Link: The John Marshall Film Collection

From 1950-2000, filmmaker John Marshall documented the lives of a group of Ju/'hoansi (!Kung San Bushman) of the Kalahari Desert in Namibia. Marshall and his colleagues shot over one million feet of film and video (767 hours), beginning in the last years that the Ju/'hoansi still lived by gathering and hunting in their harsh desert environment. Tremendous and rapid changes occurred during the ensuing fifty years, both on the individual level and within Ju/'hoan society at large. Marshall's film and video document these changes, along with interviews in which Ju/'hoansi share their thoughts and feelings about the past and their hopes and concerns for the future. (Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History)

Newsletter: Global Voice Foundation

The mission of the Global Voice Foundation is to
produce educational programs that promote
cross-cultural understanding.
Political and environmental pressures have threatened the
stability of many of the world’s indigenous cultures in recent
decades. Ancient sources of wisdom, primarily held through oral
traditions, are vanishing. The goal of the Global Voice foundation
is to share these valuable insights of cultural sustainability with
our children before it is too late.The mission of the Global Voice Foundation is to
produce educational programs that promote
cross-cultural understanding...

Link: Kalahari Peoples Fund

Welcome to the Kalahari Peoples Fund

The Kalahari Peoples Fund is an Austin, Texas, based non-profit 501 (c)(3) organization formed for the benefit of the San and other indigenous peoples of the Kalahari Desert. Its main function is to act as a liaison between the rural peoples of the Kalahari region and the individuals, groups and agencies who are able to assist in their economic, educational, cultural and sustainability needs.

[Editor's note: This article breaks in style and presentation with those usually published in the Journal of Natal and Zulu Hisroy. However historians today have to deal increasingly with questions of cultural authenticity, performance, heritage and tourism, and consequently it was felt that this article, produced within the context of cultural and media studies, would be of interest to readers of this journal.]

This study examines the relationship between media constructions of First and indigenous peoples, and the 'performative primitives' who are employed in 'cultural' villages in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN).

Issues of representation, cultural policy, and ways of staging authenticity interact via three key discourses, and their associated social practices:

iii) cultural tourism and responses to it (spontaneous, economic, developmental).

Specifically, I examine the ways in which these three discourses intersect via media and cultural tourism, reconstituting both modem and customary narratives into 'history'. In other words,

i) how the marketing of cultural villages, authenticity and indigenous artifacts replicate common sense discourses about Same (Europe) and Other (Africa) (cf. eg. Kohn 1994; Hamilton 1992); and

ii) how western stereotypes about 'people' as 'primitives' impact conservation and development policies.

Cultural tourism commodifies the encounter between tourists and indigenous people, and is a growing sector of all economies. This activity involves both: a) formal entrepreneurial responses via tourism capital; and b) under-resourced and remote villages, where such activities are little more than ad hoc survival strategies. As such, the social and cultural impacts of cultural tourism need to be studied to develop policy and strategies that locate the staging of 'authenticity' within an educational framework. 'Performers' themselves need to engage the perceptions and anticipations of visitors who might bring with them all manner of stereotypes to the encounter.

The idea of pursuing cultural tourism arose from my field observation in the Kalahari (1994-1999) with regard to San responses to tourists (Tomaselli 1999a; 1999b; Simoes 1999; Sehume 1999). Analysis of conservation and identity is also of importance with regard to the way that cultural tourism is promoted within the semiotics of eco-tourism (cf. Draper 1998; Draper and Mart 1999). I return to these points in the article.

A great deal of research has been devoted to how people make sense of the world or more simply, how meaning is conveyed. It is curious then that such research has largely overlooked the physical means of experiencing the world; touch, taste, sight, hearing and smell, without which meaning could be neither constructed nor interpreted. This absence of sensory information has been noticed and attempts are being made to squeeze human experience back into academic research, particularly Paul Stoller’s(1997) plea for “sensuous ethnographies” to replace theory-laden anthropological reports. Emphasis is shifting to the phenomenolgy of taking part in the world, rather than sitting thinking about it. To create an accurate representation of a place, researchers must lay themselves open to “the smells, the tastes, the sounds, the colours - lyrical and unsettling - of the land”(Stoller, 1989: 156). In an attempt to encourage the recognition of the necessary role our physical senses play in academic research, I offer a model for understanding the process of smelling, a theory of olfactory semiotics.

The five physical senses are the researcher’s only reliable means of acquiring information. This relationship seems so obvious that discussion of the senses has been considered trivial and unscientific. However, even the most abstractly theoretical academics would be incapacitated without their senses. However hard we try, we cannot separate the mind from the body. Instead we should strive to understand the relationship between our sensory world and the theories we design to account for it. Being indispensable to research, the five senses deserve more attention. Of these five, I focus on smell because it is one of the simpler senses to examine in terms of meaning. Conveyed meaning involves encoding and decoding, so a person would convert a message into words then another person would read the words and convert them into a message again. Similarly, a friend may attempt to convey an idea by encoding it in a touch. I then would decode the touch and construct a meaning, which may or may not be the intended one, from it. Smell is simpler to examine as people seldom encode messages in smell and an olfactory analysis need only explain how the message is decoded, or how smells cause people to feel certain feelings. In this way smell provides a simple introduction to the operation of the senses.

An academic paper on smell appears ridiculous and apart from the exclusion of sensory activity from academic research mentioned above, I believe this has two causes. Firstly, smell has been marginalised in Western society. Modern instant meals are cooked by formula in the microwave and food smells the same before and after it is cooked. Pollutants in the air leave everything smelling the same and dull our ability to distinguish between smells. Medication relieves hay-fever at the expense of a sense of smell. These factors have made smell less important in quotidian life, but the second cause is undoubtedly more important; the majority of the producers of academic research have become divorced from smell because they churn out papers in air-conditioned buildings. Smell isn’t of any value to modern academics, so they don’t write about it and don’t want to read about it. Where University-bound intellectuals of the past could at least savour the heady aroma of a polished oak desk or the musky whiff of a leather bound book, today’s controlled environment academic lives and works in a dull blend of air-freshener, carpet solvent and industrial strength anti-bacterial cleaning agents, all recycled by the air conditioning system, sometimes literally ad nauseam. As the realm of academic research is dominated by people to whom smell is of very little consequence, it is hardly surprising that a paper on the topic seems unusual. It falls outside of the dominant interest.

To understand how meaning is constructed from smell, it is important to understand the concept of signs. A sign is a way in which meaning is passed on, and consists of a signifier which ‘points to’ or ‘stands for’ the signified. For example, a picture of a knife and fork are commonly understood to mean ‘restaurant’, and this understanding is a sign. The picture of a knife and fork(signifier) ‘stands for’ the restaurant(signified) and the two acting together mean ‘restaurant nearby’(sign). This notion is parallelled by Pierce’s concept of firstness, secondness and thirdness in constructing meaning from or ‘reading’ a text. At the first level, a reader experiences an initial understanding of the text. The level of secondness sees the reader recognising specific concepts represented in the text and at the third level these concepts are unified and the reader constructs a meaning from the concepts recognised at the second level. Levels two and three are thus used to explain the experience described in the initial encounter at the first level. In the same way the concepts of signifier and signified are used to explain their sum, the sign. Both of these approaches to the explanation of meaning break the process down into elements in order to understand workings of the system, however simple it may seem, by which a part of the world came to be represented as having a certain meaning.

The methods of understanding meaning described above are combined in Keyan Tomaselli’s (1996: 37) Phaneroscopic Table, which provides a framework to explain how meaning is constructed while also being able to account for varying interpretations of a single text. This table, based on Pierce’s three levels of signification, examines the experience of making sense of the world or what it is like to decipher meaning. Keeping the basic structure of signs as consisting of signifier and signified in mind, I have simplified and adapted this table to explain how we derive meaning from smell.

Level

Phaneroscopy

Process

1

sign

Firstness: Central Idea

emotional response

2

signifier

Secondness: Identity in the face of the other

identification of nature of the smell

3

signified

Thirdness: Modes of relations

explanation of response

Fig 1. a model to explain the semiotics of olfaction

The process of making sense of a reaction to a smell is broken into three parts, the first of which is explained by the second two. This first level describes the overall experience of smelling, for example feeling disgusted. At the second level the probable cause of the smell is identified and the smell is distinguished from others, the smell of rotting fruit for example, which excludes the smell of freshly ground coffee, thus the smell is identified by both what it is and what it is not. The third level is where the initial response is explained in terms of the particular smell identified in the second, so I feel disgusted because the smell of rotting fruit reminds me of the terrible food I was forced to eat at boarding school, to complete the example. The third level then describes the relationship between the particular smell and the response to it. The feeling of disgust can be seen as a sign which is accounted for by identifying the signifier or cause at the second level and then the signified or reason for the response at level three. Simply put, to understand how we make sense of a smell (level 1), we break the process down into the raw materials (level 2) and the treatment applied to the raw materials (level 3). Each interpreter of a smell will appeal to a different set of experiences in making sense of a particular odour. This means that while the basic smell or signifier identified at the second level remains the same, it will remind people of different experiences at the third level, and hence illicit a different emotional response as described at the first level. This model of the semiotics of olfaction can thus account for the range of responses prompted by the same smell. Rather than having a fixed meaning, a single smell has an infinite number of meanings because each interpreter makes sense of it using their idiosyncratic personal history.

To ground my theory with some field work I shall apply the model of olfactory semiotics described above to smells experienced in the town of Jwaneng, a mining town in the south of Botswana, about 24 and a half degrees both south of the equator and east of the Greenwich meridian. The other important details of the town should, like all places, reveal themselves through an analysis of its smells.

The most striking of the smells experienced in Jwaneng created a feeling of unease. The smell was located on a corner along Marakanelo Crescent, a surprisingly straight road that runs parallel to the main road through Jwaneng. The basic smell that created this unease was urea and where I am from the reek of urine is associated with either dodgy public toilets or dark alleys. As these are dangerous places for someone of my build to be, the smell of piss elicited the general feeling of unease necessary to keep me alert and leaving. However, in Botswana the smell was merely an indication of some shrubbery that could be used by local builders in the absence of superior facilities. Due to our different circumstances, the same smell identified at the second level causes different relations at the third level for a native Jwanengian and me. Our overall experiences at the first level are thus also different and while I feel uneasy, they may feel comfortable as the smell signifies a safe place to relieve oneself. Different interpretative systems result in the same smell causing opposite emotional responses in two people. The builders who use this bush as a toilet and create the smell are working on the town’s only casino. When completed the structure, at about four storeys, will be taller than the mine-sponsored, reflective blue civic centre over the road and I use its iron skeleton as a landmark on walks through the suburbs of Jwaneng.

Another of the key smells of Jwaneng is the smell that brings about a feeling of perseverence and clench-teethed optimism. These feelings accompany the situations that result in my spending time in car workshops, the source of the smell. The actual components of the workshop smell are many, but they definitely include sun-baked grease, rotting upholstery, sweat and a little petrol. This workshop smell reminds me of all garages and the need to get a difficult and inescapable job done, hence my feeling of optimistic perseverance. In other words, my feeling at level one can be explained by the basic smell at level two and the connections made from this smell at level three. On this occasion the smell is from the yard of Jwaneng Motors. Our research party is in Jwaneng because our 4X4 broke down near here four days ago and we were towed to the nearest garage. The car is still in the yard, reminding me of photographs of train-crash victims lying in the snow(http://www.rotten.com); all the pieces are there, but while they’re spread over a 25 meter radius they aren’t any use at all. While I stood in the workshop, hosing engine cleaner off important motor parts and feasting on the workshop smell, it seemed impossible that my family thought I was studying a group of displaced San somewhere in the Kalahari desert. Luckily the smell seems to be affecting our mechanics, Wafula and Richard, a Kenyan and Zambian respectively, who must be working the equivalent of two Botswanan working weeks each day on the car so perhaps we’ll reach the Kalahari after all.

Jwaneng’s hard working smells are by no means confined to the workshop, the mechanics and my hands. In another part of the town is a smell that suggests a feeling of wholesomeness, probably as a result of the academic tendency to romanticise manual labour. This is the smell of freshly polished verandahs, maturing in the morning sun at our hotel, the Mokala Lodge. Mokala means leaf, the absence of which from Jwaneng suggests a sarcastic hint to the title of this lodge that, like most buildings here, used to belong to the mine. Recognising our desperate situation, the new manager allows all five of us to share a room in the lodge, paying only for two. The smell of polish in the morning evokes images of difficult work done early in the day, a concept so foreign to most academics that it is viewed as honest and noble. The smell is thus able to create a wholesome feeling, through the association of diligent work and a form of honest purity. This diligence does not operate at all levels of the Mokala Lodge’s staff hierarchy and I spend a portion of each evening flashing my body piercings and swopping addresses until the women at reception allow me to take mattresses from vacant rooms so that our ethnographic team can keep their bodies off the tiled floor.

One of the most powerful aspects of olfaction is the ability the process has to link seemingly unrelated places and times. A certain smell can call up detailed memories that seemed forgotten and the stench of burning plastic can transport a person from a desert campfire to an inner-city scrapyard where men cut through geysers with blow torches. Through smell an entire sensory memory, including tastes, sounds and images, can be accessed. This seemingly inexplicable linking of very different situations is accounted for by the table above(Fig. 1). The memory, the scrapyard scenario, for example, experienced at level one can be explained by the triggering smell of burning plastic at level two, and the associations drawn at level three. An analysis of another smell in Jwaneng may be of assistance in illustrating this point. The Mokala Lodge, in addition to guest rooms, includes a restaurant and bar. While sitting in the bar I experienced a sudden and powerful yearning for my flat in Durban. The feeling was acute and exceeded the general ache of homesickness that plagues field researchers. This yearning can be explained using an analysis of smell. The cause of the yearning was the old smell of fried vegetables and almost burned rice that drifted from the restaurant’s kitchen into the bar. These are the smells of the delicious food cooked by Kai Bin, my Chinese flatmate at home in Durban, hence my strong homesick feeling. So my yearning at level one is explained using the smell, or signifier, identified at level two and the memories, or signified, associated with the smell at level three. The smell of food from a nearby room triggered comfortable memories of home and the two created my sudden yearning. I later met the daughter of the Botswanan ambassador to China in the same bar, a girl who speaks English, Tswana and Mandarin, but magic can’t be accounted for by this model of olfactory semiotics.

The Lodge provides breakfast for two of our five each morning in the restaurant, the kitchen of which smells like home to me. We take it in turns to eat the two breakfast as each additional breakfaster would have to pay 37 Pula for their morning meal. This charge forced us to find an alternative and cheaper eating house in Jwaneng. This alternative turned out to be the Meno Masweu, Tswana for “White Teeth” and home to another of the town’s formative smells. Anthea described the smell of the Meno Masweu as homely. While the sceptics may argue that this is due to the smell of the food that keeps us alive, I feel a more detailed smell is at work. The furniture at the Meno Masweu is melamine and chrome tubing with the tables being protected from spilled papa and morogo by those appalling floral-print plastic table clothes. I feel that the restaurant’s homely smell can be explained by the indestructible plastic smell given off by the table clothes. The connection between the homely feeling described at level one and the plastic smell of level two is simply grandmothers. I know that my grandmother was not the only one to protect her decent furniture with those table clothes. Although the smell itself is unpleasant, it holds connotations of blanket-knitting, biscuit-baking grandmothers that are the essence of homeliness. In short, through the smell of plastic table clothes, the Meno Masweu restaurant in Jwaneng, Botswana, is able to access comfortable memories of childhood from Pietermaritzburg, South Africa and as such becomes homely itself, such is the power of smell.

Other smells are more general, and belong to the whole of Jwaneng, such as the smell of quiet excitement that accompanies early morning in Jwaneng. I attribute this feeling to the smell of the dewy grass drying in the sun. Jwaneng is Tswana for “grass”, so it is vital that the smell is included in an olfactory analysis of the town. The excitement is linked to the specific type of grass, being the long brown variety, as lawns don’t smell the same. Whenever I am able, as a city dweller, to enjoy the smell of that type of grass in the early morning, I am road tripping with family or friends into the country side. These trips are always eventful and almost as often fun. As a result the smell of long grass drying in the sun is coupled with the prospect of interesting things ahead. My feeling of excitement can be explained by the smell of dewy grass which evokes memories of road trips, so the grassy smell of Jwaneng around sunrise gives the town an exciting feeling which, coupled with my attraction to the long, sharp shadows of morning, keeps me getting out of the Mokala Lodge before the rest of our group.

Sometimes smells are created by an unusual blend of smaller odours. These hybrid smells are able to invoke, because of their rarity, very specific emotional states, instead of the vague feelings usually associated with smells. One such smell exists from time to time in Jwaneng and can be explained, once again, using the three level model of olfactory semiotics described above (Fig. 1). Between the lodge and the workshop lies a pub, which operates from the back of the former. On a few occasions, when passing the pub, I experienced a very unusual sort of ropey enthusiasm. This feeling was due to the fortunate urban geography of the area. The pub, as I mentioned, was attached to the back of the lodge where the laundry was located. At the lucky times when I experienced the ropey enthusiasm, the smell in the air was a combination of fabric softener from the laundry and the aroma of alcohol that has been processed by the human body. The emotional response at level one seems far removed from the cause smell identified at level two, so level three will take some explaining. Firstly, the reason the smell of our naked significant others matches the smell of their bathrooms (Hoban, 1978) is that both smell of the fabric softener used by the significant others, which accordingly becomes associated with comfort and security. Next I must explain the feeling of post-hangover euphoria. Whether it’s just the contrast of feeling alright after feeling so bad or a feeling of awe at the body’s ability to overcome a severe poisoning, there is a definite feeling of ragged-on-the-edges happiness once the pain of a hangover has subsided. These two feelings, of comfortable security and frayed happiness come together in my feeling of ropey enthusiasm experienced in Jwaneng. The smell coming from the laundry was that of my girlfriend’s fabric softener and the pub’s smell of processed alcohol reminded me of many hangovers. The two together, however, had a unique effect. To the day I am not, despite living with her in our flat, allowed to spend the night at my girlfriend’s family home. This means that when I see her after a night’s indiscretions, I have already walked from my family house and have come through the nasty part of the hangover, into the euphoria. So, when I am faced with the combined smell of both my girlfriend’s fabric softener and the smell of processed alcohol, I am feeling good and in great company hence the ropey enthusiasm that seemed to come out of nowhere walking along a dusty street in Jwaneng. By breaking them down into a trigger smell and the associations triggered by the smell, emotional olfactory responses can be explained and understood.

Although of less personal significance, another key smell of Jwaneng creates the feeling I think of as African. This is the feeling I get when I’m exploring and I think, “This just doesn’t happen in Europe and I’m glad it happens where I am”. The African feeling, while pervading all of Jwaneng, is particularly powerful in what is known as “downtown”, a strip mall that is the commercial hub of the town. Lined on one side by small shops, downtown is also home to most of Jwaneng’s street vendors and it is the smell of the latter that carries the African feeling. Aside from fruit and vegetable sellers, Jwaneng seems to have more than its fair share of music stalls. These stalls all sell hats, combs and a similar selection of African music cassettes. Each also has its own wheelbarrow, car battery and ghetto blaster. The ghetto blaster is to play the music which, with shouts of haggling and greeting, provide the auditory component of the African feeling. The battery is to power the ghetto blaster and the wheelbarrow is to carry all the goods, music playing even on the journey, to and from downtown. The smell of cassettes and ghetto blasters, with rubbish left by vendors and clients, baking in the sun is the one half of the smell that triggers the African feeling. The other half is that of perishable goods perishing in the sun. As in similar conditions all over the continent, street vendors in Jwaneng are faced with preserving their wares in the shade where customers can’t see them, or putting them on display in the sun where they quickly wilt and wither. The fruit and vegetable sellers have about them a smell of sweat and partially decomposed apples, bananas, oranges and spinach which is dried and sold in indigestible-looking lumps. These combined smells of aging plastics and semi-fresh produce remind me of markets from South Africa where I often enjoy the African feeling, so downtown Jwaneng also gets some of my Europhobic gloating, and I’m happy to be in Africa, anywhere in Africa.

One of the best things about towns the size of Jwaneng is that its easy to get out of them. 15 minutes of walking puts you in the bush and in line to enjoy the smell that surrounds Jwaneng and is marked by a feeling of reassurance. The smell that brings on this feeling could simply be termed the smell of the veld, a sort of dry minty smell, more of an aromatic tingle around the nostrils than a bona fide smell. The subtlety of this smell is the reason for the feeling it brings. The first thing I noticed on getting into the bush is the silence. My city background has led be to associate silence with fear and vigilance and with the silence comes the feeling of my unprotected back expanding, vulnerable. Luckily, in the absence of sound the other senses become more powerful, and the subtle smell of the bush, a watered down version of the Cape’s fynbos smell, becomes distinct. This smell is so uncitylike that it reminds me of my location and the inappropriateness of my response. With this realisation I no longer feel exposed and am able to enjoy the surroundings. In this way the subtle smell of the bush around Jwaneng brings a feeling of reassurance by reminding me that the silence here is not threatening. I can only hope that when we eventually reach the Kalahari that this smell is there too. Once again, the specific smell at distinguished at level two triggers effects at level three, creating the general emotional response to the odour described at the first level.

The above smells are by no means exhaustive of the olfactory delights of Jwaneng Botswana. Other aromas, such as the smell of woodsmoke from a community that is largely without electricity, although every house with electricity has a satellite dish to receive South African television, and the smell of five field researchers who were expecting to be living in the desert where no water is available for washing, are important in gaining an understanding the town. The smells above are, however, sufficient to illustrate the ability of this model to explain and account for the way we make sense of and experience smells. Hopefully the model also serves to remind consumers of anthropological research that researchers react to and make sense of their field experiences in ways that rely heavily and often uncontrollably on their own personal experiences. I cannot exclude myself, as a researcher, from any data I collect in the field because this data is generated by me, the researcher.

The role of the senses in academic research and specifically field work has largely been ignored. Discussion of personal sensory perceptions, rather than overarching theory, has been equated to being “caught with [our] anthropological pants down”(Altork, 1995: 112) despite the latter’s dependence on the former. In an attempt to recognise the importance of the senses in research, I have focussed on smell and offered a model of olfactory semiotics to explain how we make sense of smells. This model examines the history of how an olfactory response came to exist by breaking the response down into cause and effect or signifier and signified. By exploring how we make sense of the world using our senses, I aim to place more emphasis on field researchers opening themselves up to experiences in the field and working out a theory to explain these experiences, rather than waiting for specific experiences that fit a predesigned theory.

Encounters in the Kalahari. A Revisionist History

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1999
Updated from Visual Anthropology, 12 (2-3) 1999
It is perhaps passé to remind readers that one band or group of San, the Ju/'hoansi, have become the extraordinary international focus of photographers, TV and film directors, anthropologists and environmentalists, development agencies, artists, zoologists and tourists, and all manner of academic enterprise. This extraordinary focus on a single band is, of course, due to the pioneering ethnographic work done by the Marshall Family during the 1950s (Ruby 1993; Wilmsen 1999).

While the San in general, and the Ju/'hoansi in particular, are discursively struggled over within the metropoles of academic and commercial media production, the subjects themselves get on with their lives as best they can, as do other communities living in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Angola. This quotidian existence is not, however, conducted in isolation from these contesting discourses and mythical representations development projects and cultural tourism ventures. These imagings find their photographic sources in the Kalahari, but their cultural unconscious is more often than not the unconscious of the West (see Critical Arts 1995; Garland 1997).

The San subjects are themselves now actively part of the process of imaging, discursive contestation, and appropriation. Under these conditions, the San appropriate anything and everything that is ready-to-hand for its exchange value: payment and food for information; for inter-village transport, for cultural performances, real or pseudo, sale of artifacts, as guides, cooks, gate guards, and for acting in films and TV.

Thanks to the internationalisation of their struggles via First Peoples organisations and global communications networks, the San and Basarwa (the official Botswana naming) have in the 1990s connected into First Nations networks. This secures them a power beyond the intermediaries who have sought to image them, define them and, in many instances, to confine them. As Tsamkxao =Toma of the Nyae Nyae area in Namibia has stated, "The white road from the west brings us visitors as numerous as birds before the rains. If these visitors want to know the thoughts which are inside my had, they have only to ask me" (Quoted in Biesele, 1993). The power of interpretation is no longer solely vested in the film maker, the photographer, the anthropologist, the development worker, the politician, the teacher or the funding agency. The balance of power, of course, remains skewed in favour of the latter, as it is they who control capital, the media, and knowledge production in general. But the fragmentation of grand narratives in the postmodern age has created discursive spaces whereby these can be engaged and mobilised by indigenous communities seeking home-grown interpretations of themselves and their respective places within the world. One such re-articulation as conducted by an 11 year old who accompanied CMS researchers and students to Ngwatle in 1995. She used our video, artifacts and photographs to correct her school's `traditionalist' syllabus of the San.

The furore over Pippa Skotnes's Miscast Exhibit [1995], to which San and Basarwa groups were invited, is a case in point (Douglas and Law 1997). Miscast has become a defining moment in the recuperation of San and Khoisan identities in post-apartheid politics in Southern Africa (Jackson and Robbins 1999). It also provided the site of academic contestation which for a moment supplanted previous discursive struggles relating to representations of the San. If the first broad phase was the attack by North American anti-apartheid anthropologists and film makers against Jamie Uys's The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980, 1989) films, then the second was surely the questioning response of eighteen anthropologists to a scene in John Marshall's preview of A Kalahari Family (1995) (Barnard et al 1996). The third reaction, indigenous responses to Miscast (1996), is perhaps the most significant, as for the first time the voices of the subjects - whether for, against or in between - were emphatically heard.

Those who have historically represented the San are no longer the sole arbiters of representation or interpretation - a role they had played historically even if this was never their intention. The condition of current Ju/'hoansi life is perhaps a scrambled mixture of the premodern, modern and postmodern (Boloka 2000). What are the implications of this realisation for visual anthropology? How does it impact the Ju/'hoansi themselves? And, how does it affect those of us who inevitably find ourselves caught up not only in the academic debates, but also in the power of capital which coopts anything and everything in shaping particular media images and imposing specific, and not always appropriate, development strategies, on dependent societies and communities? If the global media have usurped the academy by bankrolling via TV the representational power of history, where does this leave not only academics and visual anthropologists, but also those who are depicted by these images? There are multiple discursive layers to be traversed here, just as there is a scrambled path to modernism and postmodernism which provides contradictory routes for development projects in the Kalahari itself.

Despite the significance of the Marshall Family expeditions of the 1950s, with the exception of Wilmsen (1999) and current research by Sonja Speeter, a German anthropologist, little has been written of these and the processes which they catalysed. The subversive comments made by Uys's Ju/'hoansi actors as recorded by John Marshall, and the ubiquitous "There are two kinds of bioscope" uttered by Tsamkxao =Oma, have been amongst the few published responses by those who have been for so long the subject of the global media gaze. Where is the Ju/'hoansi take on these films, on the myriad images, on their encounter with these travellers, photographers and academics? The theme issue edited by Tomaselli on "Encounters in the Kalahari" hopes to provide some clues to these questions.

Ed Wilmsen's "Knowledge as the Source of Progress: The Marshall Family Testament to the "Bushmen", and how they came to the Kalahari offers some pointers as to the ill-advised exclusionary practices of academics vis-a-vis the work of the Marshalls, and of Lorna in particular. Wilmsen implicitly questions academic silences regarding the monumental study undertaken by Lorna during the 1950s. Part of the restricting dynamic involved in the early neglect of Lorna's work was the perception that her independent wealth had shielded her from having to "pay her dues". This entailed coming up through the ranks in academic anthropology. Belated proactive work on the part of a number of her younger associates (Megan Biesele and James Fox at Harvard, Peter Carstens and Richard Lee at Toronto, and David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson at Witswatersrand) rectified this regrettable situation to some extent. More to the point, the exclusion and/or marginalisation of Lorna at and from meetings and debates at Harvard perhaps occurred because her work was considered insufficiently evolutionist or theoretical.

Wilmsen also reminds readers of Robert Gardner's (1957) (mis)appropriation of The Hunters, to the extent of suppressing mention of John's authorship in the making of this seminal film. It is my belief that the restriction of debate, discussion and recognition by those who have conferred upon themselves an exclusive academic or filmic legitimacy vis-a-vis other approaches is often linked to power plays and claims of ownership of particular topics and subject communities. This kind of intellectual and discursive imperialism does neither the academy, nor as has become quite clear in the case of the Ju/'hoansi, the subjects any good at all. In fact, the results can be quite devastating for those being studied and filmed, as John, Rob Gordon and others have repeatedly argued. Progress does not emerge from paradigmatic exclusion and appropriations of intellectual ownership. Rather, advance comes from open public debate, recognition of commonalities and difference, and mutual and honest engagement of these.

Whatever criticism Biesele has absorbed through her ill-fated association with the Discovery Channel's Hunters of the Kalahari, lessens can be learned, policies can be enacted, and appropriate filmic strategies can be developed. TV channels like Discovery continue to trade on myth and stereotype, especially about Africa, though film makers like Craig Foster who work with discovery have established clear relationships with critical academics and San NGOs in order to come up with strategies to engage these myths from within the media industry. Another is Rob Waldron who has been visiting and videoing a community at Ngwatle, Botswana, since 1989. His film on changing tracking techniques is called Hunt or Die. TV's use of often anthropologically incompetent producers, who appear to form the lifeblood of the Channel, inevitably tilts global discursive power in favour of the myths which John Marshall and Rob Gordon identify as genocidal. Biesele and Hitchcock (1999) in discussing "`Two Kinds of Bioscope': Practical Community Concerns and Ethnographic film in Namibia" explain some of the background to the problem faced by consultants on films who have no way of ensuring that their recommendations are followed.

The remaining articles in this Kalahari volume of Visual Anthropology flesh out aspects of the San in representation, and in relation to tourist impacts on them. Also provided for the first time is a published shot log of the film record made by John Marshall of the Marshall Family Expeditions. The log refers to the 700+ feet of 16mm film located at the Smithsonian. Notwithstanding the endistancing by anthropologists of the time from this corpus of both written and filmic work, its unique value to both the Ju/'hoansi and academe, is only now becoming clear. This volume, then, aims at recovering aspects of the Marshalls' seminal legacy in the Kalahari, the contribution made by them to anthropology itself, and to John's constant exhortations on ethics, social responsibility and accountability. Allied to this recognition must be of course the San themselves, and the Ju/'hoansi in particular. As /Angn!ao /' Un has stated: "we have to be concerned now about ourselves ... These days we have to work with our own heads, because in the past it was someone else's head that got us into trouble" (quoted in Biesele 1993).

The next section backgrounds some of the unpublished analyses which appear on this Web Site.

Visual Anthropology in South Africa: A survey of the turbulent 1980s

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 1989
Updated August 2000
In 1980, thirty-two years after the National Party had premised apartheid legislation on its theory of `racial' and `cultural' differences, concepts of ethnographic film and visual anthropology gained currency in South Africa.

Filmmakers had plundered South Africa since the turn of the century. International television cameras focused popular attention on the demise of the San (known as `Bushmen' in films and TV) and the seemingly immanent fall of white Afrikaners. Simultaneously, Afrikaans-speaking practitioners of volkekunde (people's ethnology) were desperately attempting to shore up apartheid's racial, cultural and language classifications by recalling a static, genetically determined sense of `ethnos' which biologically identified particular `races', and located them in their respective `homelands' where they could practice their `own' customs and speak their `own' languages. This was, of course, forced on these `population groups' (the official euphemism for `race') by legislation backed up with force. Volkekunde was an important aspect of the legitimation of apartheid as an exploitative socio-spatial arrangement. State sponsored films reinforced this view of social reality (eg. The Performing Arts in SouthAfrica, To Act a Lie and A Place Called Soweto).

The cynically romantic view of African life in the Garden of Eden was also a valuable lure for tourism. After 1987 a series of instant ethnography books, lavishly illustrated with colour photographs, on black tribes (eg. The Zulu, the Xhosa, The Bushmen etc.) and `disappearing' people like the San and the Khoi-Khoi appeared in the bookshops, especially at airports and hotels. The message of these ethno-tourist guides is that black societies still live in pre-industrial times in peace and harmony with their environment, untainted by the pressures and demands of modern life, white colonisation or monopoly capitalism.

Though South Africa is richly endowed with ethnic phenomena and expression, it was for these reasons during apartheid that the concepts of visual anthropology were regarded with suspicion by progressive academics (1). The absence of critical work was exacerbated by a reluctance on the part of liberal anthropologists to descriptively study forms of ethnic and cultural expression which might have provided the government with further data to back its claims of cultural or racial `difference', legitimised by Afrikaner politicians' conservative cultural theory and its static academic cousin, volkekunde. Indeed, it was only in the mid/late 1980s that English- and some Afrikaans-speaking anthropologists began to challenge the ideological determinisms of volkekunde and the interests it served. Prior to this, they simply ignored them. Volkekundiges tended to be powerful individuals within the state and were employed by various government departments including Defence for a variety of repressive and socially manipulative purposes. To criticise these individuals was also to test the will of the state.

Ethnographic film production before 1980 was mainly of a conventional documentary nature, serving up paternalistic images of people for South African and Western audiences. Exceptions were, of course, the films of John Marshall (The Hunters and the !Kung San Series) and Laurens van der Post (eg. Testament to the Bushmen [Tomaselli et al 1996:93-96]). As both of these individuals lived elsewhere, they had little impact until the '80s on actual film making practices in South Africa itself. Their thoughtful and sincere depictions were countered by the largely pop representations churned out by Peter Becker - really an advertising executive in disguise - in thirteen episodes of The Tribal Identity (1976) made for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC-TV). The indescribably crude Disneyfications offered by conservative white producers of both feature films and television documentaries aimed at black audiences took care of viewers with no access to television after 1974 (see Tomaselli 1988; Gavshon 1983).

My own experience as a cameraman/editor in the making of a series of tourist films in the Transkei for a local producer during 1976 was an alienating one and emphasised the absence of a theory of representation of ethnographic phenomena (see Tomaselli 1999a:xv-xiv). When I joined the teaching staff of the University of the Witwatersrand's School of Dramatic Art the following year I was fortunate to work with one of the few film theorists in the country at the time, John van Zyl. We agreed that something had to be done about the state of ethnographic film making in South Africa. The introduction of broadcast television in 1976 was a significant factor in the concurrent take-off of critical media studies. While on sabbatical in 1977, Van Zyl participated in a course offered by Robert Aibel at the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. He returned to the School in Johannesburg and we set up the first undergraduate course in South Africa in the theory of ethnographic film. Karl Heider's Ethnographic Film (1976) and Sol Worth and John Adair's Through Navajo Eyes (1975) were the primary texts.

Thelma Gutsche's (1972) PhD thesis submitted to the University of Cape Town in 1946 provided a chronological history of the industry laced with tantalizing remarks about documentary and early ethnographic films. Conservative cultural theory amongst Afrikaner filmmakers during the late 1930s and early '40s was displaced from the concurrent rise of Afrikaner Nationalism by these filmmakers' reliance on an overtly racist form of volkekunde and a desire to return to a pre-industrial pastoralism (Rompel 1942). The year 1980 saw the inaugural issue of Critical Arts: A Journal for Media Studies. Critical Arts challenged South African academic genuflections to the First World metropoles and sought to develop critical approaches to the study of African media and culture (cf. Tomaselli and Shepperson 2000). The first serious article on South African ethnographic film appeared in this journal (Van Zyl 1980). It was based on viewings of the limited archival material by Van Zyl, myself and Harriet Gavshon (now a documentary filmmaker) at the National Film Archives in Pretoria during 1979.

Our collective naivety on how to approach the study of ethnographic film was greatly advanced, however, by viewings and discussions which occurred at the Ethnographic Film Festival organised by Van Zyl at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in July 1980. Jay Ruby was the Festival's guest and his insights and commentaries on films that he screened transformed local debate about visual anthropology overnight (2).

The Festival also coincided with extensive film and video research undertaken by Len Holdstock of the Witwatersrand University Department of Psychology. His interest was sangomas (indigenous healers in Soweto, a dormitory city of over a million black people), many of whom maintained strong rural or traditional links. Holdstock had broken with conventional psychology's emphasis on pathology and was looking to the study of sangomas as a way of reorienting psychology to a `health' model. He substituted the positivist emphasis with an organic way of `feeling' relationships and other aspects of behaviour.

Holdstock produced a number of videos in conjunction with the Witwatersrand University Central Television Service, as well as one film, On Becoming a Sangoma (1980), and thousands of feet of film shot by myself. During filming I consciously applied Heider's (1976) principles to our own ideas on `feeling relationships' in recording this material. The film has minimal edits and the social interactions filmed directed the camera.

Holdstock had been working with a group of sangomas for a number of years and they were consulted during and post-filming for their comments and explanations. The approach owed more to Karl Jung's assertive psychoanalytical theory of myth than anything overtly anthropological. Holdstock's Indigenous Healers of Africa, for example, is a video documentation of a conference on indigenous healing with the sangomas themselves participating and consulting at the University of the Witwatersrand. Ruby and Gei Zantzinger, both guests of the conference, critiqued the project for putting the sangomas in a supposedly `alien' environment. Sangomas, in fact, operate in any and all environments. At Witwatersrand University they had been allocated a consulting room in the Department of Psychology where they treated students.

At the same conference Zantzinger talked about the Mbira music films he made with Andrew Tracey of Rhodes University. These were part of a catalogue which represented a systematic attempt to visually document indigenous music. While in technical terms the films are excellent (see Van Zyl 1981), the discussion pointed to the tension caused by using conventional documentary signs like dissolves and tilts to represent metaphorical elements of symbolic oral narratives. The results tended to be filmically untheorised. One problem was using an American cameraman who obviously had little, if any, sense or feeling of Africa or African ways.

"Ethnographic Film and the Problem of Ideology" was presented at a sociology conference in 1980 (Tomaselli 1980). The paper critiqued Ikaya on black housing in terms of cultural iconography. Made by the Institute of SA Architects, the film was argued to legitimise state repression through inappropriate cinematographic techniques and a lack of political, social, economic and ethnographic understanding.

In 1981 the first Honours course in ethnographic film was set up by myself in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University. The course was grouped into four broad headings:

"The pluralist view" incorporated the work of Heider; film as a self-referential medium; and the attributes of ethnographic film.

"The exclusivist view" studied written anthropology as referent; and reflexivity. Documentary and the problem of method, Ruby's producer-process-product model and criteria for a filmic ethnography were examined.

The "Anthropology of Visual Communication" examined Margaret Mead and the Annenberg School including the work of Worth and Adair. It also examined the idea of subject-generated films and the semiotics of ethnographic film.

The "Composite Approach" included observational cinema; participant film/video and worked towards a theory of semiotic production of ethnographic film.

A research team from Rhodes University took part in the Human Sciences Research Council Intergroup Relations Project during 1982/3. This Project, involving 200 academics, was designed to offer resolutions to what it termed `intergroup' (i.e. interracial) conflict in South Africa. The Project concluded that apartheid was the root cause of conflict. While this conclusion might not have been a surprise to the Council, the Council's conclusions were totally rejected by the government. The Rhodes report entitled "An investigation into the Ethnographic Myths Encoded into South African Film and TV" was one of two (of 118) to offer a Marxist analysis of the `problem'. In all, about 150 films were systematically studied and documented, though most of this work remains unpublished. We concluded that most films made by whites about `other people' (i.e. blacks) were not ethnographic simply because they happened to depict people on screen. In other words, the mere exposure of black people on screen did not mean that it was their voices that were being heard. Our report also questioned the inequitable power relations which frequently privileged the interpretations of film crews over those of written anthropology and more importantly the subject communities themselves. These were issues the government and SA Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), a state-owned monopoly, found difficult to then understand.

The study done for the Council showed how the ideological discourse in film and video content shifted from `Bushmen as animals' to blacks as `savages', `the Noble savage civilised', `blacks as human but different' and finally to blacks as paradoxically `the same but different'. These categories coincided with shifting attitudes caused by historical dynamics in the political economy as South Africa moved from primary to secondary industry, and the resulting massive increase in black urbanisation after 1970. In contrast, films on the San and !Kung like the Van der Post series tend to expatiate the producers' social guilt at being part of the dominant group responsible for the demise of the Bushmen. The study was published in lengthier book form as Myth, Race and Power: South Africans Imaged on Film and TV (1986). Its authors extended Ruby's (1976) formulation to (INTENTION)-Anthropologist-Producer-Process-Product-Audience-(PURPOSE). This modification was needed to explain the way in which films that met Ruby's criteria of a filmic ethnography in one viewing context (eg. A university) can be turned into propaganda in another (eg. Broadcast TV). Steenveld (nd.) later expanded Ruby's ideas in her analysis of another video commissioned by the 2nd Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in South Africa, I am Clifford Abrahams, This is Grahamstown.

In Johannesburg, Van Zyl turned his attention to the visual anthropology of photographs and television while others began to make videos on particular ethnographic topics. Graham Hayman and anthropologist Pat McAlister produced Shixini December: Responses to Poverty in the Transkei for the 2nd Carnegie Inquiry, while Kat River - The End of Hope recorded a remarkable spontaneous lament by an eighty year old illiterate peasant farmer about to be dispossessed of his farm under South Africa's racial policies (see Tomaselli and Sienaert 1989; Tomaselli 1997).

Zantzinger worked with anthropologist David Coplan on the songs of the migrant mine workers in Lesotho, Songs of the Adventurers (1986), and the SABC presented one episode out of thirteen adhering to the most innovative of documentary and ethnographic principles. Titled And Then Came the English, its director, Lionel Friedberg, resigned from the series because of subsequent interference from his producer at the SABC. This single episode placed Friedberg at the forefront of ethnographic film making following his previous shoestring series, They Came from the East (see Van Zyl 1981). This series was itself a remarkable development on his early collaboration on Peter Becker's Tribal Identity. Marshall's The Hunters was shown in segments on the so-called black TV channels.

Paul Myburgh's People of the Great Sandface (1985), is a feature length documentary on one of the supposedly last remaining groups of San in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana. A graduate of anthropology and film theory at the University of South Africa, Myburgh claims to have spent ten years on the project (Myburgh 1989). He was influenced by the documentary theories of John Grierson and Robert Flaherty, and claims to have immersed himself in this small hunter-gatherer community. The film documented the band's eventual decision to join a Botswana government settlement where water could be obtained from a tap, meat bought at a store and where alcohol is now rotting their guts.

Sandface
needs greater attention and study than it has received to date. This is because:

On the surface, and in terms of his interview with myself, Myburgh's method of production apparently drew on anthropological and cinematic theory (often questioning them) (Myburgh 1989). He also drew on a holistic idea of `structures of feeling', social relationships and attitudes rather than trying to dissect and inspect their parts. Basically, People of the Great Sandface is modelled on Nanook of the North: time, rhythms, relations and actions are coded organically rather than technically or chronologically. In the previous version of this paper I concluded that "This film (Sandface), like Holdstock's, tries to understand its subjects on their terms and not in terms of the ready-to-wear cinematic devices thrust on filmmakers on `How to…' text books, documentary devices and narrative structures.

Sandface
, however, drew immediate hostile response from a viewing in 1990 at an anthropology meeting at the University of Vermont. Rob Gordon (1990:32) compared the film to Leni Riefenstahl's Last of the Nuba. The debate was then taken up by Ed Wilmsen (1991), Mathias Guenther (1991a; 1991b) and myself (Tomaselli 1992a). Myburgh briefly (1990) replied, but refused to be drawn further. In an attempt to address Gordon's (1990:3) very pertinent question of why this film appealed to "respected, well-informed and critical media commentators as a breakthrough", I conducted a dialogue with some film theorists and film makers (Tomaselli, Gabriel, Masilela and Williams 1992). Gabriel suggested that Myburgh was exploring his own identity via the film, and was using `Bushmen' as the means. Myburgh did tell me on the phone in mid-1990 that he could partly relate to this `dialogue' about his film, if not the other comments made on it, about which he was very angry.

All this was happening while Jamie Uys' international hit, The Gods Must Be Crazy, was angering/entertaining millions in France, Japan, Canada and the United States, where it was amongst the highest foreign film ever screened. This is perhaps the most extensively reviewed and critiqued South African feature film outside of the country (see eg. Davis 1985; Volkman; Blythe 1986; Kauffman 1984). Is it racist? Is it offensive? Is it an intrusion into San life? Are Uys' film making practices ethical? These and other questions recur amongst foreign critics. Gods is but one of Uys' films which image `Bushmen' as part of the natural environment. Though he has a romantic view of the `Bushmen' living in never-never land, his films can also be seen as humorous criticisms of aspects of Afrikaner culture and individual foibles against which he compares a romanticised version of a sensible San culture. Most critical commentaries have foregrounded the absence of the `political' in Uys' films and have ignored his Afrikaner self-criticism. An auteurist analysis of Uys' films remains to be done, but I think that such a study might yield less evidence of racism than he is accused of by his critics (see Davis 1985; Tomaselli 1992b). In a related way, questions on John Marshall's use of an American lens on `actors' in the Kalahari and the re-socialising effect of repeated filming (in conjunction with ongoing material processes) on N!ai in N!ai: Story of a !Kung Woman from being a young child to an alienated adult, for example, should be examined more critically (cf. Ruby 1993; Tomaselli 1999). Kauffman complains that Uys "not only introduces Bushmen to cameras, he made an actor of one of them, took him into an utterly strange environment, paid him off and left him." But we must ask similar questions of Marshall. To what extent was a money economy initially introduced by the Marshalls and other filmmakers, photographers and researchers? Something of a cash economy certainly preceded Gods. Uys should not be the only filmmaker of the San to come under critical scrutiny.

In 1985 the Contemporary Cultural Studies Unit (CCSU), University of Natal, Durban was established. One of its courses was titled "African Philosophy/Ethnographic Film", later changed to "Visual Anthropology, Documentary Film / Visual Sociology" (cf. Tomaselli and Shepperson 1997). This course re-oriented received ethnographic film theory from its American and French origins to a more African approach. This was accomplished by prefacing the ethnographic section with a close reading of Marxist-inspired African philosophy and African responses to Western anthropology, notably Paulin Hountondji, revisionist history offered by Cheikh Anta Diop (1974), the cultural nationalist theory of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (1986), WE Abrahams' (1962) critique of philosophy and anthropology, and Van der Post's (1958) attempts to locate our cultural origins in the Khoisan culture. A study of these writers identifies considerable hostility towards Western anthropology and its metropolitan derivations, ideological orientations and colonial/neo-colonial effects. A disturbing realisation concerns the often racist and imperialist origins of the discipline and the difficulties of shedding these influences which linger in a conservative and paternalistic guise in Van der Post's writings (Masilela 1988a, 1988b). These influences are, of course, at their most vicious in television series about indigenous cultures. It is these racist effects that were evident in volkekunde and its theological/ethnological justification for separate black homelands and the dispossession of blacks living in `white' South Africa. One means of escaping both the colonial history and anthropology and the genetic determinism of volkekunde was for liberal anthropologists simply to ignore them. However, recently, volkekunde has been engaged (Sharp 1979) and the Unit offered a critique of volkekunde and films about Afrikaners and others which this mode of thought is reflected.

Both the CCSU and Rhodes University (Anthropology/Journalism and Media Studies) offered courses on the ethnographic film and films are, of course, used by South African departments teaching anthropology. Michael Whisson of Rhodes' Anthropology Department issued Ecco Homo: An Introduction to Anthropology on Film (1989) to first year students. Though many films are sensitively discussed, he makes no reference to theories of visual anthropology or ethnographic film. Pat McAlister writes of Rhodes' second and third year courses:

We usually include a number of sessions on photography and film (including ethnographic film) in the Fieldwork Programme. The idea is to introduce students to the use of film as a research method, to illustrate the nature, uses and limitations of ethnographic film and to contrast such films with `documentary' (although we do not draw an absolute distinction between ethnographic and documentary). Some South African videos are used in conjunction with issues such as the role of social scientists in South Africa; others to provide visual representation of historical and social processes (Letter 23.1.1989).

The field has broadened considerably and academic studies were beginning to appear which could be argued to be visual anthropology, even though they mainly rely on psychoanalytical/ semiological theorists for textual explanation. An analysis by Kathy Berman (Berman) of Tommy McClennan's The Volunteers (1984) is a good example. A fourteen part SABC-TV series, The Volunteers was an experiment in observational film making. A family of five and nine younger unmarried volunteers were located for six months in an isolated valley to see how contemporary middle class English speaking whites would fare in an 1820 settler environment. The film crew was the only external influence. Berman states, "What began as an unique reconstruction of history, became a dramatic revelation of the psychological and sociological factors attendant upon such experiments". She concludes that the series provides an excellent example of the semiological tension still to be resolved between television narrative and exposition. While foregrounding this argument berman backgrounds questions of historiography, anthropology and principles of ethnographic film making.

Shaka Zulu
(1986), a worldwide cable television success, raised much discussion, particularly from historians. The producer claimed that its depictions of Zulu life and history were accurate. The series was politically significant as it imposes contemporary Zulu Nationalist politics on reified historical myth thereby legitimating apartheid and the discourse that `blacks are different' - though a force demanding legitimacy. In the process, it succeeded in terrifying a whole generation of young white school children (Mathews 1987; see also Mersham 1987, 1993). The series may be read as allegorical of the repressive actions of Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha movement as it forcibly imposes Zulu membership on recalcitrants who see Inkatha using the same ethnic mobilisations so successfully adopted by the South African state.

History News
(1987) published some papers from a Natal University Oral Documentation Centre discussion in 1987. This event was intended to engage producers claiming to make accurate representations of South African situations without understanding the disciplines (in this case history and anthropology) - or the relations between disciplines and film representations - which might have guided production crews to a more sensible understanding. Carolyn Hamilton (1988) showed how production constraints on Shaka Zulu affected both historical and ethnographic accuracy. She similarly located her analysis within the contemporary dynamics of the South African political economy, concluding that Shaka Zulu is actually about the process of a struggle for a new hegemony in South Africa, one which is not fully worked out by any of the parties involved (Hamilton 1988: 33-4). These discussions of the series raise questions of whether historical and ethnographic accuracy is possible where commercial production practice dictate content in terms of markets.

A later development was a reception theory working group funded by the Human Sciences Research Council. As defined locally, reception theory sweeps up a whole bag of ideas drawn from communication, linguistics, mathematics, theology, semiotics, cinema studies, etc. Much of this work occurs in the abstract regions of `interpretive' theorising being closely tied to the conservative (Heideggerian) interpretation of hermeneutics and phenomenology which has influenced certain sections of South African communication studies. This approach tries to come to grips with what it sees as "the polarized nature of South African society (which) intensifies the diversity of perception and reception" (Lategan 1989). The `differences' tend to be explained in terms of metaphors which are located outside of history, outside of political economy and independent of ideology (see, eg., Botha 1989), that is, it is largely a reception theory which ignores the Habermasian critique of this approach.

One exception applies a postmodern approach to film criticism and connects a Funny People type movie, You Gotta be Joking, with deeper contextual social processes to explain how white South Africans created representations of themselves which help them to laugh at themselves while the country around them went up in flames (Olivier 1989). A text-based emphasis, however, shows up the limitations of this kind of analysis which is somewhat inappropriately extended into a theory of reception. In this case, both the filmmakers and audiences are projected and constructed without empirical knowledge of either. Ultimately, of course, it is precisely these relationships that need to be examined through concepts provided by visual anthropology.

Another project was "Jim Comes to John's Jo'burg: An Intercultural Investigation into the City as Metaphor in the Fifties". This study draws on literary cultural studies. Its starting point was that the South African city in film, literature, photographs, etc. is "variously, a cultural crucible, stronghold of apartheid, mother archetype, centre of prosperity, centripetal power, existential space, dehumanising monster, polarising power and macrocosmic image of present-day South Africa" (Malan and Malan 1989). Coordinated interdisciplinary projects are all too rare on local academic scene, but this project was never completed.

Conclusion to Part 1

In apartheid South Africa the notion of ethnicity had been entrenched into historically frozen categories bearing little or no relation to contemporary developments. White South Africans in particular were largely socialised into an acceptance of this mythology. The result was that the majority South African filmmakers continued to conduct their practices in terms of political rather than ethnographic understanding. However, academic theories of documentary and ethnographic film were beginning to significantly influence local filmmakers in methods of representation and production practices, especially with regard to professional film and TV makers like Friedberg, Berman, Becker, McClennan and scriptwriter John Cundill (see The Mantis Project). These influences partly stemmed from both media and anthropology departments, with the former having taken the lead, but also from the production and aesthetic theories of the various film makers concerned.

The next section is written by Belinda Jeursen, and deals with a specific intervention which brought a range of studies on the San under one cover.

The articles by Gerald Wieczorek, Belinda Jeursen, Kaitira Kandjii, Jeffrey Sehume, Anthea Simoes and myself, are the result of a larger project undertaken under the auspices of the Centre for Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Natal. The main project is entitled "Semiotics of Visual Anthropology: Encoding, Reception and Orality." The articles included here complement a thematic issue called "Encounters in the Kalahari" to be published in Visual Anthropology (12/3 - 1999).

Wieczorek's comparison between subsistence and sports hunting, via his study of John Marshall's The Hunters, derived from a suggestion made by Cynthia Close, who manages Documentary Educational Resources (DER) in Boston. Robert Gardner, a computer consultant for DER, and a hunter, responded empathetically to the film. Close hypothesised that sports and other hunters might therefore respond in similar, possibly existential, ways to the film, in comparison say, to historians, anthropologists and media scholars. Wieczorek, a former army ranger and later, stockbroker, a hunter, and a traveller to exotic places, was a student in a visual anthropology course I was teaching at Michigan State University in the Spring semester of 1998. I suggested to Wieczorek that he respond to Close's suggestion with his own study drawing on his own experiences. The result, I think, is intriguing and, as Close anticipated, offers a conceptually refreshing analysis of the film in relation to his own subjectivity as a hunter.

The commentary on a field trip to Nyae Nyae by Belinda Jeursen, offers a critical travelogue on the problems of cultural tourism facing the people of this region. Together with the Interview article with film maker Rob Waldron, she penetrates stereotypical Western images and perceptions of the San, and tells us something about some of the lesser known personalities involved in various kinds of development and human rights projects.

Tangential to the above is Kandjii's critique of a poster developed by students to publicise the student organised Visual Voice ConFest held at the University of Natal in 1995. Kandjii's questioning of the stylistic graphic representation of an Ndebele woman reminds even critical scholars that an archaeology of representation will always identify concealed residual signs of common sense discourses, perhaps of the very kind being opposed by the authors themselves. This kind of internal critique within the same student community is, I think, the essence of a self-reflexive academic practice.

The review of the video, Planet in my Pocket, by Jenny Gage, also a visual anthropology student at Michigan State University in 1998, engages a film that is highly critical of anthropology and myths of anthropology as encoded in Disney films, theme parks, and other cartoons and films. It reveals how media and cultural tourism construct American images of the Third World and native Americans.

All the articles draw on field work of various kinds, and on how this research impacts those involved.

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date: 2000
Place: University of Natal, Durban, South Africa
Type of product: Comment on book.
Copyright: Keyan G Tomaselli
Appropriating Images is about being an African scholar. In the book I am speaking to both Africans and scholars located other parts of the world, across a broad range of disciplines. The book is not about being a scholar in or of Africa. It is rather about being an African who is also a scholar, writing from African and Third World perspectives. The book is therefore about the semiotics of identity, and how that subjectivity is inscribed into one's research, writing and publication. The way that this inscription is erased in the international publishing process, and in the way that reviewers read and respond to works emanating from Africa, can be read in both the refereeing and reviewing processes.

While Africa is not in the title, it is on the cover in the form of a stylized San rock painting. Africa is present in the very extensive Contents pages, and Africa is (with the Third World in general) in the theory and illustrations used. My African (and especially my South African) location is emphasised in the book's contents, examples and films discussed.

Appropriating Images is my attempt to come to terms with Africa, Africans and the often weird and wonderful things that occur on the continent, and elsewhere amongst indigenous First Peoples (often referred to as the Fourth World) living in the First, Second and Third Worlds. The Preface, then, is about anthropological mystery. The ensuing chapters develop a semiotics to explain such mystery - both the sacred and the profane. The book is about trying to come to terms with power and power relations, about describing and explaining the scientifically unexplainable, and about the history of encounters between the Western anthropological enterprise and indigenous subjects of the Western gaze. It's about my and my colleagues' experience in making movies on situations and people whose discourses, behaviour and achievements are often beyond the comprehension of current scientific paradigms. It's about peoples, countries and a continent, in a double millennium-old asymmetrical engagement with Europe. It's about the nature of and effects of the encounter between observers and observed.

While the book has a dual thrust methodologically - semiotics and visual anthropology - it's also about reconstituting these two methods from the perspectives of the Other, the Third and Fouth Worlds in general, and Africa in particular. The book is not about the First World, though it draws and develops, rearticulates, and modifies methods and theories, into Third and Fourth World contexts. Drawing on American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce I and my colleagues here in CMS have attempted to reconstitute semiotics within an African content, to find a way of applying it such that it does not fall foul of accusations of conceptual imperialism. Being a method rather than a theory, this rearticulation becomes possible, and also eliminates the problems of essentialism and Afrocentricism.

Africa was a contentious issue from the start of the project in 1990. The US publisher wanted me to erase the lesser known Third and Fourth World film examples. Their referee - who was solid enough on the concepts - missed the African orientation - the African and Fourth World subjects looking back at the West looking at us. The Danish publisher has worked in Mozambique and the Solomon Islands, amongst other `exotic' locations, as a development anthropologist. If the US publisher had no inkling that the world beyond the USA was different, the Danish publisher was keenly aware of the very extensive differences. What the US referee saw as a marketing weakness, the Danish-appointed referees considered a conceptual strength. For this reason I decided to cancel my association with Indiana University Press and work only with Intervention Press, a specialist in visual anthropological works.

Appropriating Images was the result of six years of research and writing, starting with my 13 month sabbatical in the USA in 1990/1. It is partly a collaborative work under my direction and solely authored by myself except for two co-authored case studies listed under Chapter 8:

Research and writing the book took me to the USA, Scandinavia, Europe and parts of Southern Africa;

Research sponsorships came from a variety of sources, and are listed in the Acknowledgements;

The reception analyses of films and videos drew on the work of teams of evaluators constituted by the African Studies Center at Michigan State University. I administered these film evaluation teams while I as a Fulbright Scholar there in 1990/1. My development of an appropriate theory in the book also benefited from discussion with my colleagues and students here at UND. The theory offered, however, is my own creation.

The book has been prescribed at the following Universities, amongst others:

School of Government, University of Western Cape (development policy planning);

Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University (medical anthropology, visual anthropology);

Graduate Programme in Cultural and Media Studies, University of Natal;

Historical Studies Programme, New School University, New York.

The Publisher

Intervention Press is a specialist publishing house on anthropology, visual anthropology and documentary film (see letter from its owner, Peter Crawford, and the Intervention publications list). The Press publishes in English and in Danish, and is an affiliate of the Commission on Visual Anthropology of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnographical Sciences. As such, the Press has had a significant impact on the development of the subdiscipline of visual anthropology across the world, and especially in Scandinavia.

The Press has had an excellent reception from the anthropological community, as is evidenced in the extensive review by Peter Loizos of three Intervention Press books, published in Visual Anthropology, Vol 9, 1996.

The Reviews

The reviews of Appropriating Images range from highly laudatory to questioning. My approach is openly questioning of the US-centric, clinical book-learning approach to ethnographic film analysis and production offered by film theorist Bill Nichols in Semiotica. He thus finds difficulty in my emphasis on theorists who are not American and wonders at my use of a Peircean-based semiotic in preference to the dominant Western-centric post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory dominant in US and UK screen studies programmes. Shepperson (with whom I have written extensively on semiotics) reads the book in a mainly phenomenological vein, while John Williams' reply to Shepperson recovers the book's materialist emphases in a article recently accepted by Visual Anthropology (Chicago). Milbrodt and Wieczorek, both anthropology graduates, respond in terms of their respective roles as anthropology students, in terms of their very different subjectivities, ages and experiences. Social Anthropology places the book in the same class as one by cultural studies guru Stuart Hall, and then fails to mobilise on this by nit picking on one sentence, on which the reviewer then fails to elaborate.

A recurring comment is that Appropriating Images is one of the first books to make semiotics intelligible to academics and students alike who use semiotics but who are not themselves specialists in the method (see letters from Crawford and Krabill, and the review by William Pencak, in the International Journal of Germanic, Linguistic and Semiotic Analysis.)

Documentary Film, Visual Anthropology & Visual Sociology

In response to a broader paradigm-shift toward reflexivity in critical anthropology and media studies, this course attempts to address and relocate questions of re-presentation and re-construction in the context of reflexive explanations of ethnographic f ilm - images used to document patterns of culture, usually within discourses of othering. In the course, the epistemological foundations of media and media studies are critically examined - in this specific instance, ethnographic film and the construction of the 0ther.

The emergence of visual anthropology as a contender for full academic disciplinary status and the methodological claims and counterclaims made with respect to ethnographic film have become prominent in recent years as people globally have begun to assert their right to a greater say in the ways in which they can direct their common forms of life. The course will offer a critical overview of concepts of visual anthropology, ethnographic filmmaking, and visual representation. It will examine questions of power and power relations; the anthropological and media construction of the Other; and trends in visual anthropology and their relationship to documentary, ethics, recording strategies, and approaches to visual documentation. These will be contextualized in terms of questions of ontological indeterminacy, which emerge from the imputed differences between the Historical Same (Europe) and the Third World Other (Africa, South America, etc.).

Other issues to be investigated include the not ion of the "scientifically unexplainable," "ethnographic surreality," and the clash between cartesian subjectivities derived from industrial societies and those that shape the consciousness of societies still living within orality, or secondary cultures thereof. The course is contextualized within what can be seen as human experience of the last explicitly colonial environment, that of apartheid South Africa. It is intended that this will raise concrete topical criticisms of ethnographic and documentary f ilm in terms of how these genres raise their subjects to the epistemological status of "Other." As a result, many of the films screened during the course are about South Africans, and often by South Africans; however, the relevance of this selection to a wider context will be explicated throughout.

This is done in order to elucidate the global order of knowledge, which is frequently elided in the way ethnographic film (as the field work of visual anthropology) is presented to its audiences as Objective Knowledge. Because film as a product is exhibited to audiences removed both in place and time from the context of its production, the course focuses on issues both of the ethics of production and of the morality of exhibition of ethno graphic film. The different contexts within which these issues arise are drawn out with respect to the reception of film, rather than the political economy of its production. Students are required, therefore, to study both the content of prescribed films and various debates conducted about them, as well as the broader issues of theory and criticism.

Student assessment is by essay and a three-hour examination. Course duration is 12 weeks, second semester (mid-August to October). The overall intellectual environment is the multidisciplinary approach of contemporary cultural studies. Students are required to participate in applied visual anthropology projects, if these are part of the teaching department's activity, and to contribute to journal/film/video production in order to obtain a hands-on understanding of the media and communication issues which are dealt with in the course. It is possible, therefore, to include assessments of students' abilities in various practical aspects of the issue as part of the course.

The general theoretical background is provided by the textual material. The focus on semiotics is a feature of the course, on account of the capacity of semiotics to cut across methodological boundaries. In the formulation of this course, semiotics is presented as the study of how thought, knowledge, and behavior relate to meaning. This relation is used to examine the way in which meaning is subject to mediation via the technological practices of film, TV and video, photography, and computers. The following text provides the theoretical basis of the course:

Opening of Art Exhibition by Vetkat Kruiper

Last year, round about this time, the Bergtheil held the first exhibition of Vetkat Kruiper's art. We did not know what to expect from spectators. How would they react on learning that Bushmen San art did not die out a century ago? How would Vetkat’s work be seen in relation to the coffee-table reproductions of ancient rock-art? Would the present style be seen as somehow inauthentic? Or would it be understood as a moment in a constant reinvention by artists all over the Kalahari? We must have got something right, because a number of works were sold from the exhibition, which then moved to Pietermaritzburg, and from there to the University of Pretoria, hosted by its Department of Architecture.

Pretoria University, being the business-minded institution it is, not only significantly raised the prices asked by Vetkat, but then itself promptly bought the entire collection at the higher prices. Now that's what I call marketing vision. It is also obviously due recognition of one of South Africa's most talented emergent artists.

My own institution, Natal University, is obviously also delighted to be able to host Vetkat's work again, this time along with works by other Kalahari artists Silikat van Wyk, Tolla Witbooi, and Dals Koper and Rikki Kruiper, both of whom have moved onto the spirit world. This time we also have a photographic exhibition by Sian Dunn, who joined us on our April 2003 visit to the Northern Cape. Another contribution to building a sense of `being there' - in the Kalahari - is Tim Reinhardt's five minute video essay on Blinkwater, where Vetkat gets his inspiration. Both Sian's photos and Tim's video provide some idea of the place and space, time and rhythms, and of the wind, sand and sky. So arresting is this environment that Belinda told us on first meeting her in April 2000, "You can leave the Kalahari but the Kalahari never leaves you".

I and my students visit the =Khomani San, and the Kruipers once or twice a year, and this is the second time that Belinda Kruiper will be an `honorary' visiting professor, whom our students will be consulting on their research. One of these students is Linje Manyozo, who is studying photographic representations of the Bushmen, in particular Sian's work and practice, amongst other photographers. Another, Lauren Dyll, in her thesis, "Close Encounters of the First Kind", is interrogating Belinda's response to what she calls "This Western development-type stuff". Marit Saetre, working on a self-reflexive video, caused a stir at the Molopo Lodge when all the local farmers, hunters and policemen encircled our camp, on foot and in 4X4s, inverting the tourist-native Gaze to get sight of this fair Northern goddess. Marit responded that now she knows what it is like to be a Bushmen being gawked at. Vanessa Dodd is examining The Healing Land, in which Rupert Isaacson recalls his spiritual journey with this community, in which he was assisted by Belinda in translation and research.

Mary Lange's reflexive video, Kalahari Fires, is being used in some Durban senior primary schools, where she is conducting a reception analysis of the video, and in Botswana where it was taken in 1995. So enthusiastic were the Ngwatle community with this video, which is narrated by Charlize Tomaselli who is depicted when she first visited Ngwatle when she was 11, and now at 18 narrates it, that the some the San women wanted to return with us to take up teaching posts in Durban, teaching !Xoo culture first hand.

This kind of result from our Kalahari visits is a humbling and challenging experience, and is a powerful reminder example of an incident recorded in a sequence on a PBS documentary called Anthropology on Trial. On a Pacific Island, Big Man Onka has the attention of the camera, telling it that the professor of Anthropology next to him, is in fact the real student - he - Onka - is the real professor, though he can't read and doesn't have any degrees. That's because when the anthropologist arrived on his Island, the anthropologist knew nothing about the Islanders, and had to be taught about them by Onka.

Our experiences in the Kalahari are both similar and different to the story told by Onka. They are similar in that the =Khomani indigenous knowledge is extraordinary. Consider this extract from Nelia Oets's experience:

I’d torn some ligaments in my ankle the day before I left for Witdraai. This was diagnosed by one of my friends in Upington who is a medical doctor. When Elsie and Silikat asked to see what had happened to my foot they very much made the same diagnosis just by touching and pressing around my ankle. Elsie then started to massage my foot, while Silikat was cradling my ankle in his hands and told me silly little stories to take my mind off what Elsie was doing. It was extremely painful but as a trained physiotherapist I knew that what she was doing was the very best treatment possible. My friend had studied for six years, I studied for four years and here are these two people, literally out of the bush, knowing just as much as we do.

But our experiences are also different, in that our relationship is based on mutual respect and participatory research methods. As Vanessa Dood copmmented on her first first visit to Blinkwater last year:

The first time I met vetkat Kruiper was on a cold, windy winter day ... where we huddled next to the fire in the red sand. Vetkat said two things that day which i will never forget: "Ek doen my eie ding" [I do my own thing]. And, "respek net daai klein bietjie, dan kan on ver kom" [just that luttle bit of respect, then we ca go far]. Tonight, says Vanessa, is about respecting Vetkat's individuality and creativity, for his work is a celebration of himself, Belinda, of First Peoples of the Kalahari, of the future of life itself.

We are less concerned with the one-way extraction of information from the Bushmen - one of their constant complaints about researchers in general - than we are in jointly developing socially acceptable research methodologies and mutually beneficial relationships. The questions with which we are concerned are:

a) Do our informants/hosts/co-researchers recognise themselves and their experiences in both familiar and new ways in the texts, photographs and videos we produce?

b) Does the resulting narrative include, if implicitly, the communities' way of explaining the world? Does it critically engage with whatever theories or methodologies we bring to the encounter?

c) Are our own theories useful in the daily lives of our sources/hosts/informants/co-researchers? If so, how? Are the outcomes of our encounters mindful of power relations, deceit, and manipulation?

d) Is our work in the academy able to generate a symbolic return on investment for the community? We certainly would want this exhibition to be part of such a return.

Vetkat and Belinda enact a number of roles within the =Khomani. Our experience shows something very different from the confused nonsense broadcast on a recent e-TV newcast, about the =Khomani allegedly getting 60 000 hectares of land back, and somehow simultaneously regressing into the `past'. What this exhibition will show, hopefully, is how the work of Vetkat, amongst other =Khomani artists, both reflects and leads the objective of the Blinkwater community: to chart the paths from there in the past to here in the present, and from here now to there of the future. The sand, the wind, and the desert are the means. The regeneration of the community is the end.

This exhibition was organised by Mary Lange, a CCMS student and director of The Circle Connection. The displays were put up by her and Natal University students. The eats are supplied by Nedbank, and the wine by Stellenbosch Farmers' Winery. The invitation was done by Gareth Mybkebust. Thanks to The Independent on Saturday for advance publicity, and to Elana Bregin who is now also no stranger to the Kalahari, for writing the article. Most of all, thanks to the Alvine Calboutin of the Bergtheil Museum for providing the venue. Last of all, of course, thanks to Vetkat, Belinda, Silikat, Tolla and the late Rickki and Dals, Sian and Tim, for making this exhibition possible, one that is for the first time multimedia in scope.

Liminal Experiences, Intercultural Encounters

Author: Tomaselli, Keyan
Date:
Author of book: Ursula Karsen Mcadorey
The Old Man Mountain (Macmillan Boleswa, Manzini)
1992, 200pp. ISBN 0-333-5879-5
This book aimed at secondary school readers has an Alice in Wonderland sense of liminality. Four young white children disappear into another world inhabited by remnants of the San. The vehicle for this transformation is a cave into which one of their number wanders and in which he becomes lost. In the cave the children find San rock paintings of a long lost era which is their first introduction to the San on the other side with whom they will spend three months.

In the process the white children come to terms with their own identities, and with another culture much more in tune with nature than is their own society. The San group adopts the children and takes them on a journey into their environment, their culture and their hopes and aspirations. The Old Man is the Leader in at least three senses:

he is leader of the band of San and the white children adopted by it; and

as an individual with some Western education, he leads the group back towards the old ways of the "ancient" San as decreed by the Gods. Thirdly,

he is leader in the sense of a teacher - he teaches the young band of San to survive in the hostile, almost primeval wilderness, through which they trek to the "secret" place which is unknown to the outside world; and he teaches the white children to understand San ways, cosmology and survival, and to speak well of them when they return to their own society.

This is an interaction of different cultures and social norms. The white kids are naughty individualists who learn the hard way about the need to put the community above themselves. They are forever causing serious problems for the group, straining its security, its cohesiveness, and therefore, its cosmological order, and thus its survival. But as the narrative progresses the white children begin to understand the San way of life and why this band wants to retain it. This is a coming to consciousness for them, a learning experience before they return from their liminal state back to "civilization" where they are unsuccessfully interrogated by anthropologists and other scientists. But it is also a coming to consciousness for the San who learn to adapt to the white childrens' sometimes seemingly irresponsible behavior and their "negative" influence on the San children.

This is not a narrative such as Jamie Uys's popular Gods Must Be Crazy [1980 , 1989] films which imply that the San cannot come to consciousness about another culture. It's not a narrative which like Paul Myburgh's People of the Great Sandface [1985], freezes the San at a fixed neolithic time; it's not a narrative like the Discovery Channel's Hunters of the Kalahari [1996] which demands a culturally inappropriate characterization of its subjects. Old Man Mountain is a story about the preference for an original consciousness over that of the outside world's, but one which also engages that consciousness. But it is ultimately an unknowable consciousness, one which resides in the "other" side of the misty Mountain, which perhaps represents the `other' side of Western material, individualistic and selfish ways of life.

This book, though aimed at children, thus offers to some extent a symbolic resolution to cultural incompatibility between modern and pre-modern cultures. Its symbolism is deep and multi-layered. The surface narrative is an Alice-like encounter with the Other. But like Alice's encounters, in this book the children discover other kinds of non-linear logic, no less valid than the cartesian nature of their own culture. But more, the white children also stand for Karl Jung's concept of the child within all of us, the human desire to reach back into an imagined innocent and natural collective unconscious - that state of Eden, of human purity, and maturity (as represented by the old Man) which can never be recovered. In this sense, Old Man Mountain, though coming across in a sometimes tedious post-apartheid politically correct expression, is perhaps not that different from the romantic First People's genre popularized by Laurens van der Post in his books, films and lectures.

The scientists who interrogate the children on their return give up, concluding that their experience was imagined and not real - an imaginary state which perhaps typifies Van der Post's own recollections of his "Bushman" past, as is remarked on by Ed Wilmsen (see Belinda Jeursen's article in this volume.)

The young children of the present are confronted with the wisdom, knowledge and experience of the wrinkled Old Man, who represents the interminable but now bygone past, unknowable to Western science. The Old Man himself went through a liminal experience and returned to his culture a very different person to the one who had left it. Here is the intercultural merging, and the value in learning about the other's way of life by doing what s/he does.

The story is about a number of things: it concretizes in fictional narrative Laurens van der Post's introspective musings on the Bushmen, the First People, as the original culture on which white South Africans can regain their humanity, destroyed by apartheid. It provides a method of teaching racial, ethnic and cultural tolerance, of overcoming destructive judgmental attitudes on the part of whites. But is also recognizes that the culture represented by the four lost children has its own value and significance within traditional San conditions. Perhaps this is the kind of fiction which has genuine consequences for real people and which illustrates Ntongela Masilela's (1987) point about the San offering an original point of mythical reference for a truly South African culture, one which would look towards frames of reference which eschew competitive and destructive white and black nationalisms.

The book will be useful in teaching intercultural issues to schoolchildren, and of the value of cultures different from ours. Old Man Mountain is also an example of the power of historical genres of writing which capture within their ambit even those works which are trying to break with these received ways of making sense of the world, its peoples and their encounters.

I remember in 1995, when my daughter, Catherine Lindiwe, 11, studied the "Bushmen" at primary school in Durban. She brought home sketches and explanations of how the Bushmen supposedly live, which reinforced the static image of a people-caught-in-time. When I indicated to her that contemporary people living in the Kalahari actually wear Western-style clothing, she told me that I was wrong because my information contradicted that of her teacher's. She also told me that the proper naming was "San", and that the term "Bushman" was unknown to her. Such were the contradictions (and advances) of the then school syllabus.

The following year Catherine joined a field trip from my Centre to a remote area in South Western Botswana. This was a liminal-type experience in a sense - five days on the road, the last three over terrain so hostile that 15kms an hour in bucking 4 wheel drive was the best we could do (see Jeursen and Tomaselli 1997).

On arrival, Catherine met, talked and played with children from the village where we camped. She learned their games - the mellon tossing game (with mellons that we collected along the way, there being none at the village), the kudu hunting game, and knee dancing in the sand. She taught the !Kung children English nursery rhymes and Spanish dancing and they taught her ! K ung songs and how to gather wood. Catherine was surprised, however, to be denied the opportunity of joining the kudu hunting game with the boys. That was not "girls play" she was told by the young 16 year old woman who spoke English. This was a real and an extraordinary experience, which we documented on video.

On returning to school, primed with photographs, video, an ostrich egg and a variety of other artifacts bought from the !kung villagers, Catherine became the teacher. Her school recognized this and gave her the opportunity to tell the story of her expe riences in the Kalahari. On Show-and-Tell day, Catherine bought some mellons and, using the video record of the mellon tossing game, she rehearsed the game with some of her friends in the lounge of our house. Came the day that the game was to be enacted, she returned home furious because one of the troupe had thrown the mellons forward instead of backward.

What we learn from Catherine's experience and responses is that children:

can learn to respect other cultures when they have the opportunity to i nteract with them outside of the encumbrances of the judgmental attitudes of "science" (as is also indicated in Old Man Mountain;

learn very quickly the "proper" ways of doing things - but that experience over-rules the romantic orthodox teaching that sometimes dominates the classroom;

appreciate cultural difference to be an enriching element of existence, and to learn when community-oriented tasks and cooperation over-ride individual preferences. This was why Catherine felt that some !Kung cultural convention had been broken when the mellon was thrown forward rather than backward.

The Tourists, the Researches, the Us, the Them, the I, and the Other

The essay outlines my personnel experiences as part of my participation in a Kalahari University research excursion of July 2002, in a study of the Bushmen. These are elucidated from my view as a documentary video maker and student, from my interactions with the Other, and fellow researchers. The essay further analyses the fallacy of this interaction as being a dichotomy, but relates it to be a multiple of many. It focuses on the communities of the =Khomani of the Northern Cape, South Africa and the people of Ngwatle, Botswana, highlighting certain events and places visited over others - in particular, the former.

The People of St Lucia area: - Point of view on health and development

This project explores the St Lucia regional community (comprising of Dukuduku and Khula Village, including the St Lucia town community) and their point of view on health and economic development since the area was established as a tourism development node, in preference to the mining option almost 12 years ago.

The present paper summarizes the formative research, drawing on entertainment education principles, for the production of a short documentary and an accompanying public service broadcast television advertisement. It makes use of Development Support Communication and Participatory (Another) Development theories (Melkote and Steeves 2001; Tomaselli and Shepperson, 2003), and aims to mobilize the well-off sector of civil society to organize and agitate for the delivery of the promised benefits of the declaration of St Lucia as a World Heritage Site tourism destination. How can criticism of current dominant models of development be turned into positive, constructive, and forward-looking action? What role can different actors, in particular civil society and social movements, play in the coming decades in bringing about sustainable development? (Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, 1975) Money happens. That’s known as development. It comes from tourists, visitors and charities. It does not come from NGOs or government. Life happens. But development does not happen. We are told that development is not happening. (Tomaselli and Shepperson 2003)

A Post Modern voice for the New Anthropology Student

Author: Milbrodt, Natalie
Date: 1999
Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University
Published: Critical Arts, 13(2), 109-111.
Type of product: Book review
Copyright: Natalie Milbrodt.
In his book, Appropriating Images: The Semiotics of Visual Representation, Keyan Tomaselli offers a fresh lens through which we view ourselves and the world around us. As a former student of Professor Tomaselli, I can attest to his dedication to make his students more aware of the mechanics at work behind our perceptions of the world. Tomaselli has moved away from an Enlightenment perspective style of thinking, in which an individual attempts to uncover the elusive `Truth' of the ways of humankind through careful measurement and analysis. Instead, he employs a postmodern philosophy in his writing and classroom instruction. Tomaselli reminds us that anthropologists have their own biases and limitations that keep them from the `Truth'.

Moreover, he suggests that perhaps every viewpoint is the truth, even when they contradict each other. In riting reviews of anthropological films, Tomaselli encourages his students to begin their papers with a framing of their individual perspectives. This puts their analysis into context for the reader as well as acting as a catalyst for more meaningful interpretation of the student's subject. In his book, Tomaselli employs this technique, his Preface is an autobiographical explanation of his involvement with visual anthropology and ethnographic film-making.

After this framing, Tomaselli launches into the heart of his book, the important relationship between anthropology, sociology, and documentary film/video. He examines Western academia's experience with these combined disciplines alongside the experiences of frequently marginalized groups such as a Navajo community who were encouraged to make their own films about themselves. Most of Tomaselli's work, however, is African-centred. He explains the early and recent anthropological work done with somewhat isolated communities living in various parts of Africa. Besides Tomaselli's discussion of these groups in terms of their political and social marginalization, he uses them as a jumping-off point to discuss the concept of ritual and myth in a society.Appropriating Images provides examples as well as definitions of these illusive concepts. Tomaselli describes ritual as a useful element in every culture.In the classroom, for example, he made the complex and extremely foreign rituals of groups like the Hauka in the film Les Maitres Fous accessible for western students.Tomaselli offers a definition of myth that spans all cultures; following Roland Barthes, he states that myth is an utterance without an utterer.In other words, a group of people accept a story as fact because it has no known source to question.It is simply `fact'.

Knowing that an authorless voice has a powerful effect on us empowers us to either use that fact to our advantage, or as Tomaselli suggests, be aware of it in mediated messages.An important aspect of Appropriating Images is its wealth of advice about being a savvy media consumer. Tomaselli points out that documentarians have been able to convince viewers of incorrect beliefs about marginalized cultures due to the use of tools like the disembodied `Voice of God' we so often hear authoring the footage which by itself could have a variety of meanings.

Filmmakers have tremendous powers of influence, Tomaselli both acknowledges this power and gives his readers tools to see past the persuasive and subtle devices used by filmmakers.He advises the reader to analyze a mediated message with the perspective of what the producer's intentions were while creating the piece. Next, the reader should try to recognize the set of beliefs the writer uses as an unquestioned ideology, and question it. Even if the producer of the message does not come forth with the limitations of her/his perspective, the reader can deduce subtextual meanings to enrich the reading.

Tomaselli's understanding of his field of study paired with his life experiences make Appropriating Images a rich text.His organizational approach and philosophy are in tune with current perspectives in the fields of Anthropology, Sociology, and film making.Tomaselli leads his peers and moves students toward a post-modern understanding of our world.

Contesting Voices: The Burdened, Semi-naked and Voiceless other

Author: Kandjii, Kaitira
Date: 1995
Other Authors: Dorothy Roome
Place: Centre for Cultural and Media Studies University of Natal, Durban
Published: No
Type of product:mimeo. Review of Poster for Visual Voice ConFest, CCNS, University of Natal, Durban
Copyright:Kaitira Kandjii
Issues of reception, discrepant decodings and ideology arise every time a message is made and interpreted.These can vary widely, and images that one group see as `liberating' may be seen by another as patronising.In this paper I examine this conundrum with reference to a conference poster drawn up to publicise an event that occurred in Durban in June 1995.

The Visual Voice ConFest took place in June 1995 at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa.The term, "ConFest",coined by my fellow-student and ConFest organiser, Mikhail Peppas, is an amalgamation of the words `conference' and `festival'. In its contracted form the term is indicative of the semi-formal nature of the event, which included South Africa's first ever experimental community TV broadcast.

The aim of the Confest was to encourage debate about grassroots media empowerment and development. The theme for the 1995 event was community access media. Organised in parallel with the ConFest was the Greater Durban TV (GDTV) test transmission, for which a short-term special licence was issued by the newly established Independent Broadcasting Authority.The convening organisations of both the ConFest and GDTV were the Centre for Cultural and Media Studies (CCMS), University of Natal, Durban; the Film and Allied Workers Organisation, a national body representing film and video makers working towards greater media access; Audio Visual Alternatives, a training and production NGO based in Durban, and the Durban Arts Association, which is funded by the Durban City Council. Other participants included the newly formed Community Media Network, the Community Newsgathering Group and various video trainees from the black townships.

The Masters Coursework Media Studies class was asked to design a poster to popularise the ConFest.Three members of the class, Ph.D student Dorothy Roome, a naturalised American born in South Africa; Kubeshne Govender, a professional video producer from a South African Hindi background, and Michelle Tager, a literary studies graduate, worked on the design with their information technology lecturer, Mike Aldridge.

The poster of the Ndebele woman was the result (Fig.1).This article is presented in two sections. The first deals with my response to the poster.The second articulates the joint response of the authors of the poster. A brief conclusion on the lessens learned from this exercise concludes the article.

My own role in the ConFest was as a behind-the-scenes helper. Information technology was not a course that I had taken, but my analysis below is informed by the Documentary Film / Visual Anthropology / Visual Sociology Course I was reading for at the time.To set the scene for my response to the poster, discussed in a CCMS seminar prior to the ConFest, it is necessary to reveal something about myself.I am a Namibian, a former SWAPO (South West African Peoples Organisation guerilla), who later obtained a journalism diploma from the Natal Technikon. I am currently studying for my Honours degree in CCMS.This is a fourth year graduate programme.The languages I speak are Herero, English and Afrikaans.

My intervention on the poster was a spontaneous one, which I presented to my professor, Keyan Tomaselli.Tomaselli suggested that I present my analysis to the entire CCMS student body.This I did without warning to the other students and, at the time, I was unaware of who was responsible for authoring the poster.

My basic argument was that the poster was inappropriate for the conference.My reasons were that the image articulates a specific meaning as well as specific relations between itself and the decoder. The drawing of the black Ndebele woman at the iconic level stands for the unusual `other'. As a text, it also encodes a preferred reading for it stands for the "exotic other".

The image of the woman is constituted by the various supporting messages given off by its elements - adornments which represent Ndebele culture and the fact that it refers to a woman.

I argued the difficulty in reading a message of struggle from the image or the poster due to the fact that the constituting elements or messages do not, either on their own or at the point where they interlink, directly communicate a struggle, oppression or injustice. There is no necessary connection between adornments, Ndebele culture in general or woman in general with oppression or struggle.

I suspected that the drawing of the Ndebele woman was chosen because one of the themes of the ConFest sought to encourage the greater interest in the making and viewing of films and videos by people from Africa and Southern Africa, particularly productions which help the viewer to gain a better understanding of `other' cultures and promote better intercultural communication. My immediate response on seeing the poster is that it does not in any way contribute to the encouragement of greater interest in film viewing and culture of `others'.Rather, it makes a fetish of the difference of `others' and objectifies them.

The surrounding messages also do not imbue the poster with necessary political content and this interpretation can be taken further if we allow the word "festival" - directly below the image of the women - to be the one that fixes the image. Also note the slight slant of the head, the soft stance of the eyes and the suggestion of a smile. I do not argue that such fixing relationship is blatant, between the image and the surrounding captions, but similarly, the image cannot be seen to be a floating sign. This is even the more so since the general academic context of the ConFest did not immediately suggest tackling women's oppression or struggle or even gender politics.

Broadly speaking, the image is uncontested in its message of an idealised Ndebele woman. Part of its idealisation is due to the fact that the image is a drawing and thus relies more on capturing the form or outline that can be read as related to Ndebele culture.

Through various intellectual interludes, I was told that the image on the other hand might be taken as representing women and gender issues in Southern Africa. The image depicts women as being voiceless and oppressed, was the counter-argument.This imaging of `the oppressed' connected with one of the catchphrases of the ConFest, which aimed to "provide a voice for the voiceless", that is, a channel for the expression of local community concerns through community TV.

The necklace on the woman's neck symbolises the muffling of her voice. Hence, the image is portraying a burdened `other', was the counter-argument. In my view this naive and parochial view denies the aesthetic nature of African women's ornaments and reflects paternalistic overtone. Anyone at least partly acquainted with African beadwork will conjure up images of intriguing and colourful beauty. The problem here is that tourist discourses are renowned for mythmaking around the varied decorative and beautiful multi-coloured ornaments worn by many rural African women. Beadwork is symbolic in African cultures. Therefore, a particular culture can be identified by the different types of ornaments adorned by its women.

Certain colour schemes of beads are peculiar to particular classes of persons. In the Zulu tradition, which is similar to that of the Ndebele, white beads symbolize virginity. Opaque yellow is associated with wealth. Amongst the Herero of Namibia, women wear black beads to show sorrow or to indicate that they are in a state of mourning.

In conclusion, I hope that by using the poster of the exotic, seemingly burdened and semi-naked Ndebele woman the ConFest is not othering blacks as objects that characterise conventional visual anthropological representations.At the ideological level I want to firmly believe that the poster was not chosen wittingly or unwittingly to maintain the dominant perception of the Western people about `others' in Africa.

Lastly, I regard the image of the Ndebele woman as a romantic fantasy that violates the representation of traditional African women as the `Other'.Ron Burnett, Director of Programme in Mass Communications at the McGill University, and one of the guests of the ConFest, stated that there is no doubt that the poster plays out an unconscious strategy of `othering'.His comment on my particular interpretation, however,revealed the multi-accentuated nature of signs: It is precisely because you are reading it as an example of oppression, that the drawing revealed an unconscious desire to stereotype Ndebele woman." With this Burnett;s caution in mind, the article now turns to the response of the poster's designers.

Contextualizing the use of an icon of an Ndebele woman for Visual Voice Confest 1995

Dorothy Roome, with the assistance of Kubeshne Govender and Michelle Tager.

As a group of postgraduate students working in the Infotechnology class we were assigned the task of creating a poster to publicise the Visual Voice Confest, 1995.In selecting the icon our choice was based on a limited availability of clip art in the Coral programme, aesthetically pleasing and yet able to attract the attention of transitory viewers.clip art of an Ndebele woman, (who is not naked as indicated in the title of the article), appealed aesthetically as it presented the graphic quality of a free-hand sketch which we felt would not overwhelm the text but meld into the message of the total poster. In addition, as the issue of women's equalityhas been under considerable discussion in South Africa, it seemed appropriate to refer to this by choosing an icon of a woman.My personal interpretation viewed the necklaces around the woman's throat as a symbol of her voicelessness which related semiotically to the `visual voice' in the title of the conference.

In responding to the criticisms levelled at the choice ofthe icon I agree that the poster does articulate a specific relation between itself and a viewer, but was intended to represent the oppressive plight of many women throughout the world not only Africa. I agree with the writer that "the image articulates a specific meaning as well as specific relations between itself and the decoder"; however our subjectivity at the time of creating the poster selected the graphic to represent an image of `voiceless women' so I disagree that it encodes a preferred reading for the `exotic other'.I cite Johannes Fabian's (1990) contention that philosophically 'representation' presupposes a difference between reality and its doubles and in anthropological studies "culture has become the umbrella concept for representations". I argue that although there is a connection between representation as an idea central to various semiotic and symbolic approaches, the problem with representation is not in the difference between reality and its images but between re-presentation and presence.

In choosing the Ndebele woman clip art, we, the designers of the poster, had the advantage of distance and were not "making" the "other" in an exotic "othering" but attempting to present ourselves as people and especially to align ourselves with `other' voiceless women to indicate how essential it is for all women to seek the power of speech to assert themselves in society.In creating this poster we were actively attempting to show the plight of "voiceless" women worldwide who would benefit from obtaining the power to express their own identity, whatever form that might take.In coopting the icon, I believe we were indicating to viewers of the poster how merely sharing in overlapping culturescan be a source of cultural vitality as ethnicity becomes a desirable identitynot necessarily involving the maintenance of a separate culture (Fitzgerald, 1992).

Currently in South Africa, separate cultures are trying to integrate a nation, and the continued use of the springbok emblem for rugby is being debated,but the appeal from President Mandela to retain this emblem is in direct contrast to those who argue the springbok is a symbol of apartheid and consequently under the new dispensationshould be discarded.Similarlydebate has ensued about the national anthem for South Africa which incorporates the Nkosi Sikele, (sung during the apartheid regime as a symbol of protest) with Die Stem, (the national anthem under the apartheid rule) as to the appropriateness of such a blend.Keyan Tomaselli and Arnold Shepperson in a paper presented at the 1992 Congress of the International Association of Semiotic Studies, Berkeley, California state that "communities are dynamic entities ... that shared ... at least one discourse in common" (Tomaselli and Shepperson, 1993).The instability of signs thus allows for meanings to change through history so that at certain historical moments the social, cultural and historical expressions of groups of people can agree on the broad meanings ofimages and the dominant meaning is re-coded depending on the context as to where the sign and object are used (Tomaselli, 1996).In this way readers or viewers can appropriate meanings which best fit their solutions in terms of their cultural and class experience. As creators of a poster we appropriated the image of a woman with numerous necklaces, which seemed toinhibit her ability to speak and we re-coded this icon to send a message about the predicament of voiceless women. The reaction of the writer might well indicate similar responses from various African cultures and therefore media personnel may need to be more sensitive to the implications of their constructed messages. Alternatively by constructing such controversial messages considerable publicity for the content is generated, thereby achieving the aim of the creators; the construction of the message depends on the goals of the creators and we were attempting to attract attention for the Visual Voice ConFest.

I (Kandjii) am indebted to Professor Keyan G Tomaselli for his assistance in writing up this article and my class mates for so constructively engaging in a difficult debate about issues of representation.

Critical Arts: Theme Issue 9 (2) 1995

Author: Jeursen, Belinda
Date: 1995
CRITICAL ARTS examines the relationship between texts and contexts of media in the Third World, cultural formations and popular forms of expression. It aims to create a space for African and Third World perspectives of media (both formal and informal) in cultural and social theory.
Theme Issue 9(2) 1995

Recuperating the San

Author: Jeursen, Belinda
Date: 1995
Place; University of Natal, Durban, South Africa
Type of product: Journal review of Critical Arts Volume 9 Number 2 1995. ISSN 0256 0046. 155pp.
Copyright: Belinda Jeursen
The field of "Bushman studies" has become increasingly popular and complex since the 1950's, when the "Bushmen" were suddenly very much in demand (1995:5), not only by anthropologists and filmmakers, but fiction writers and museums too. Because one can enter the "Bushman debate" from almost any perspective, from art and archaeology to media studies or musicology, the debates often seem fractured, but the situation is really one of more approaches than issues. Critical Arts, a journal for cultural studies which produced an issue called "Recuperating the San" in 1995, provides an excellent illustration of the overlap of issues between disciplines and contexts, countries and cultures. Although it does not, and indeed cannot, encapsulate the myriad debates surrounding the Bushmen, it offers a valuable cross-section of contemporary debates. The concepts of recuperation and representation of the Bushmen on which this issue centres serve as magnets for numerous other issues, whilst ensuring that there is an identifiable thread running through the articles, which deal with topics as diverse as iconography, advocacy, the South African Defence Force and rock art.

In his Introduction to the issue, Keyan Tomaselli explains the link between recuperation, representation and the Bushmen: "The `new' South Africa has recuperated a different, affirmative image of the San, in comparison to the negative, prejudiced, representation of `bushmen' previously popularised by the pro-apartheid media" (1995:i). He sees this new image as being derived from the romanticised writings of Laurens van der Post, and proposes that it "projects the San as the bridge between the past and future" (ibid).

This recuperation has taken place across a wide range of genres, and includes not only the visual, but the written, the symbolic and the political. But what does the image of the Bushmen as First People signify? And why is it such a popular symbol?

Tomaselli and others regard the arguments raised by Ntongela Masilela (1987) as seminal in this regard. His recuperation of the writings of Laurens van der Post thus form a third unifying thread for the issue, although not all the authors explicitly refer to it. Masilela regards van der Post's writings as crucial in their imaging of the Bushmen as First People, for he believes that Southern African literature holds one of the keys to the ideological workings behind our history. He takes van der Post's The Lost World of the Kalahari as an example of his generation of writers and their intention to establish their origins and construct a unified South African national culture, this in the context of the beginnings of apartheid. Masilela proposes that they could only do so by beginning with the Bushmen as First People (1987:58).

Tomaselli writes that "Masilela sees in San culture a means to avoid the destructive competing nationalisms which threaten to sink the emergence of a non-racial future for this country" (1995:vii). He agrees with Masilela's analysis of the popularity of the San as a symbol, as does Ed Wilmsen, who undertakes a detailed critique of the writings of van der Post. But Stuart Douglas, in writing about land claims in post-apartheid South Africa, argues that instead of decentering competing nationalisms, the notion of a "First People" may lead to further competition between national groups who have competing land claims. Whatever the differences of opinion voiced in these three texts, all three authors, and Masilela himself, indicate problem areas in the positioning of the Bushmen as First People. These touch on some of the major "Bushmen debates".

Masilela, in his original article, points out that van der Post positions the Bushmen in the past, in pre-history, which excludes them from any contemporary milieu; he is also critical of van der Post's reference to Khoi and San people as "child-men", an image which has remained popular despite all efforts to dispel it (1987:60). This positioning of the Bushmen as Stone Age people lies at the centre of many debates about race and culture, and is highly revealing of Western attitudes to the "other".

Tomaselli takes up the Jungian perspective adopted by van der Post, and uses it to analyze van der Post's own works. He regards van der Post as "primarily seeking the lost childhood of mankind" (1995:iv). He is also concerned with the mobilising of popular myths about the Bushmen in film, television and advertising. Jamie Uys's The Gods Must Be Crazy, Paul Myburgh's People of the Great Sandface, and Manie van Rensburg's television series The Mantis Project all provide perfect examples of the kinds of myths Tomaselli and others want to point out. As Stuart Douglas and Ed Wilmsen also illustrate in their articles, the positioning of the Bushmen as First People is never unproblematic, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that there are no First People in South Africa. The Bushmen here were exterminated by the 1930's in what must be one of the most silenced and prolonged acts of genocide.

Regarding the Bushmen as First People, or at least a symbol thereof, depends on other beliefs about them - that they are representative of pre-historic humans, that their culture has remained intact, that they have in their possession the lost innocence of humankind. These beliefs in turn rest on the idea that the Bushmen are a people frozen in time, ignorant of modernity and permanently situated outside of the context of socio-political and economic concerns. In effect, this "other" becomes the bearer or the sign of what the West no longer has direct access to - a sense of community, a recognition of our essential humanity and innocence (1995:vi). Quoting Dieke, Tomaselli sums up well the binary upon which the construction of the "First People" rests: "white coloniser/murderer/death versus indigenous/First Culture/Life who: "throw a bridge between present-day consciousness, always in danger of losing its roots, and the natural, unconscious, instinctive wholeness of primeval times. Through this mediation the uniqueness, peculiarity, and one-sidedness of our present individual consciousness are linked up again with its natural, racial roots" (1995:xii).

Ed Wilmsen's articles offers a detailed analysis of the literary writings of Laurens van der Post, in an attempt to find out what lis behind the image of the Bushmen as the First People of southern Africa. Van der Post is widely regarded as the man who instituted the recuperation of the image of the Bushmen, from that of vermin to the Bushmen as representatives of the lost past. Wilmsen argues that the image of the Bushmen as First People is a sign which was not present in van der Post's early novels. In fact, he writes, the Bushmen as they appear in his later novels are either nowhere to be found in the early novels, or are presented in a less than flattering light. Wilmsen views van der Post's imaging of the Bushmen as the result of a trope, of a child's first memory, which begins with his early work. "The tropic figure of a child's first memory, thus, is as old as van der Post's first novel" (1995:10). The first indication of this trope appears in 1952, and by 1986 the nanny who began as "a large, black, smiling, crooning, warm, full-bosomed figure" has become "a Bushman woman, a Stone Age person...the most wonderful apricot skin and slightly mongol face" (ibid). This and other examples reveal the constructedness of van der Post's imaging of the Bushmen.

The point of Wilmsen's article, however, is not just to find van der Post out. What he is really trying to find out is why the image of the Bushmen is such a powerful and persistent sign, why the Bushmen fit the Jungian archetype of authentic humanity (1995:4). He believes that van der Post's use of the Bushmen as a sign of "primitive" people still in possession of an essential humanity was due to the failure of his use of black people in this role in his earlier novels. This failure was due to the well-known fact that black Africans did not live a "primitive" lifestyle, and that literature which persisted in presenting Africans in this way were regarded as unsophisticated. "It is, perhaps, not to be wondered that van der Post now sought new material" (1995:9).

Wilmsen identifies two strains within this popularity, the Euro-American psychological search for the lost self/humanity/community, and the South African attempt to counteract competing nationalisms and suture the political divides which are part of this country's brutal history. He thus takes into account both the theories of Jung, mirrored by van der Post and others, and the Marxist arguments offered by Masilela.Wilmsen regards the assumptions shared by van der Post and Jung as essentially racialist in their division between the "primitive" and the "modern", the "primitive" and the "civilised". The notion of the Bushmen as Stone Age replicas surfaces again here as Wilmsen explores Jung's and van der Post's presentation of modernity as fatal to the human spirit.

He criticises the recuperation of the Bushmen image on three counts. Firstly, he says, there are no Bushmen in South Africa and thus the idea of the Bushmen as the First People of this country is a false depiction; secondly, imaging the Bushmen in this way is an imposition by outsiders of outside notions; thirdly, the notion of the Bushmen as Stone Age representatives creates simplistic polarities. I would add to this that these polarities are in fact not just simplistic but damaging, in that they do not allow the people known as Bushmen to enter the political arena in a meaningful way. They also feed the myths about these people which are holding them back, for example, people who live in harmony with nature are regarded as having no use for money or material goods. If the Bushmen continue to be regarded as pre-historic people they will also continue to be regarded, conveniently, a people who do not need to be part of the political economy or the wider social infrastructure.

Stuart Douglas's article, "The Human Isthmus", is anchored in current South African land politics rather than literature, but the problems of recuperation are much the same. However, where Tomaselli and Wilmsen agree with Masilela's assessment that the image of the Bushmen is a means to avoid destructive competing nationalisms, Douglas argues the reverse, that this kind of image leads to the recentering of such competitive nationalism. He uses the Bushmen refugees of Schmidtsdrift and the Afrikaner Right Wing as a case study of two groups competing for the status of First People in South Africa as a means to successfully claim land on which they can create a separate community.

Douglas distinguishes between Bushmen and "bushman", claiming that "bushman" is a constructed category which is appropriated by many people, not just the Bushmen themselves. He demonstrates through his case study that it is a sign which is open to manipulation by both Right and Left wing because its definition can be applied by either. "On this score the notion of "bushman" being a bridge between the past and the future in a post-apartheid South Africa is not an inherently progressive idea" (1995:66).

The sign "bushman" has come to mean "First People" or indigenous people. Because South Africa has no living Bushmen who can undisputedly claim First People status, the category is left open for others to claim, among these Right Wing Afrikaners in the form of the Freedom Front. Thus the definition of "First People" comes into question. Douglas argues that claims made by the Schmmidtsdrift Bushmen for land and separate cultural development can as easily be used by the Right Wing, Inkatha or any other group with a strong sense of self identity to justify their position. Because there are no Bushmen indigenous to South Africa anymore, the Freedom Front regards Afrikaners as "next in line" for the position. If the Scmidtsdrift Bushmen, who are not indigenous to South Africa but can claim other "First People qualities", such as isolation, cultural continuity and uniqueness, are awarded land and other opportunities based on their claim to be a First People, then there is nothing which prevents other groups from doing so as well. Douglas believes that the Schmidtsdrift Bushmen have to remove themselves from efforts to secure their future on the basis of their "bushmanness" if they are to achieve anything.

However, the Left Wing has been largely responsible for ongoing recuperation efforts, not realising that these could lead to successful claims by opponent Right Wingers. The solution to the problem according to Douglas is the proviso that socio-cultural difference should not receive sanction or reward from political groups or the state, a position also taken by Gerard Mare in his research into ethnicity in South Africa (1992:107).

The two discussions of rock art in the journal, by Anne Solomon and Belinda Jeursen, are quite different in their content and approach. Jeursen's review essay explores the academic and popular interest in literature on rock art in recent years, which has led to the publication of many "coffee table" books and guides to the art. Her review follows the development of rock art research, its influence on the literature and this literature's influence on popular perceptions of the Bushmen, "For these are not just texts concerned with "art" or "cultural heritage"; they are a gauge of the development of critical thinking and each contains a distinct political message" (1995:120). She also takes up Masilela's essay, and asks whether the art really does represent a common cultural heritage, or whether it simply functions as another sign of "Bushman", aimed at healing the wounds of the past.

The literature provides a mirror for the changing attitudes of the South African public, as well as being an influence on attitudes in itself. Not all rock art books have been progressive in their representation of the Bushmen, and a public unaware of the larger debates may take at face value the literature to which they are exposed. In addition, the decontextualisation of rock art and its use for commercial purposes, such as advertising, propagates myths and stereotypes about living peoples. Her conclusion emphasises the need to distance living communities of Bushmen in southern Africa from the artists who last painted over a hundred years ago.Solomon's article also explores rock art research, but her aim is to challenge male-centred interpretations of the art itself. This she does through a critique of the "Shamanistic model" developed by David Lewis-Williams for the interpretation of the art. Attempts to recuperate the art from previously simplistic interpretations have relied on viewing the art as symbolically complex and have situated it within a religious context. But this is problematic in its separation of the spiritual realm from everyday processes. The Shamanistic model thus re-iterates the age-old problem of the division of the sacred and the profane, and thus excludes or makes less visible other aspects, such as the role of women in production. The bias in favour of male figures in publications and illustrated texts which use the art is pointed out in relation to this. The fact that female figures receive little attention is seen as another example of the activities of women being habitually relegated to the profane, the mundane, the private, and thus ignored.

Solomon argues that the effect of this is that the political and the social cannot be accommodated sufficiently; although the 1980's saw attempts to incorporate the political into rock art, the Shamanistic model still privileges the sacred. She concludes that if we are to recuperate South Africa's past, we cannot only emphasise the religious aspect of the art. Clearly, the political aspects of the art and its production must be taken into account.

Duncan Brown's article takes up another aspect of the field in its exploration of the oral literature of the /Xam Bushmen of South Africa. He regards these texts as "both a starting point for, and a continuing thread in, South Afican literary history" (1995:79). His article offers not only an in-depth analysis of the stories of the /Xam themselves, but of the implications of the collection and interpretation of these. The related issues of translation, recuperation and the danger of appropriation of these texts by Western literary discourse make interesting reading.

Robert Gordon, in his article, focuses on the attempts of Donald Bain, well-known Bushmen advocate of the earlier years of this century, to "save the Bushmen". The debates around advocacy are crucial to the wider debates because they often reveal fundamental misconceptions about the Bushmen. Gordon places these attempts at advocacy within a socio-political context and attempts to explain the popularity of advocacy as a discourse within specific time periods. Gordon provides the historical context for many of the beliefs currently held and expressed in the recuperated images of the Bushmen, and so the article acts as a valuable source of additional information and perspective.

Tony Voss reviews five texts concerned with the Bushmen in one way or another and situates their production within recent South African political changes. He regards four out of five of the texts as directly recuperating the San for the purpose of creating a bridge between South Africa's past and its future. It is only Shaken Roots, with photographs by well-known photographer Paul Weinberg and text by Megan Biesele, that Voss regards as a realistic portrayal of the lives of today's Bushmen. Having read the book myself I can vouch for it as a moving and well researched texts by two people who have a long-standing involvement with the Bushmen of Namibia.

Finally, Mathius Guenther reviews a conference held in 1994 at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, People, Politics and Power. His article confirms for me my own feelings about the conference. He regards it as having been unusual in that it set a precedent - the presence of Bushmen delegates. Although they remained silent for most of the proceedings and so were, once again, represented by others and to a large extent marginalised, their presence did make some difference. The presentations by delegates and representatives of Bushmen groups, through their focus on real problems, offered opposing, or at least differing, discourses to the academic rhetoric which so often dominates conferences. Guenther's review of the conference is well worth reading as it gives a good overview of and insight into not only the debates which arose at that conference but also the debates which a conference like this gives rise to. The Miscast exhibition and conference in 1996 followed in the footsteps of this conference, and saw a far greater presence of Khoisan representatives. It also succeeded in capturing the attention of the press and the public at large, with over 500 people visiting the exhibition daily! One can only hope that the debates themselves will continue to attract attention, and result in some form of real change rather than remaining in the exclusive ownership of academia.

The excursion to the Kalahari was part of a larger research project led by Keyan Tomaselli and sponsored by the Natal University Research Fund. Thanks are also due Susan Manhando and Dorothy Roome, who commented on the interview.

September 1995

Robert Waldron is creative director of an advertising company in Johannesburg. He holds degrees in anthropology and communication, and is working towards a diploma in environmental conservation. A documentary film maker in addition to being a television commercials producer, Waldron met Keyan Tomaselli, who has been studying representation of the `Bushman' in the media, in late 1993 [see Tomaselli 1992, 1993]. They soon realised their commonality regarding human rights concerns and research into the image of the `Bushman'1, and have been working closely since on this and other projects.

Waldron's company, Klatzko and Waldron , has not opportunistically exploited the mythical image of the `Bushman' in its advertising campaigns as have many others (see campaigns for Telkom, Colgate, Mazda, United Bank, Spoornet etc) [see Buntman 1995]. Yet Waldron is probably one of the few advertising executives, if not the only one, to have a personal and comprehensive knowledge of Basarwa groups and individuals, their locations and lifestyles in the Central Kalahari Desert. Waldron is making a video on changes in Basarwa tracking techniques with the help of one particular group which he has been visiting between one and three times a year since the late 1980s. Though my interview with him below does not deal directly with the video, it does reveal much about his underlying motivations in making the programme.

The second interviewee was Miriam Motshabise, a 16 year old young woman, part Basarwa and part-Tswana. The presentation of the interview differs from that with Waldron because of its fragmented nature. Miriam speaks English fairly well, which she learned at school in the nearest formal settlement at Hukuntsi. She grew up in the community we visited. She is completing Form 2 (Grade 9), after which she will go on to complete her education. At the time of my interview with her she was about to return to school for the second term of the year, each of which is three months. A truck is sent by the Council to fetch those children from the community who are enrolled at the school. Miriam studies Setswana, English, Maths, Religion, Science etc, all "traditional" Western subjects.

The interviews which follow were conducted in the Kalahari in mid-April 1995. I was invited on this excursion by Keyan Tomaselli who, with Waldron, had pulled together a team comprising two Ph.D visual anthropology / video students, Susan Manhando and Dorothy Roome, an archaeologist/development worker, Conrad Steenkamp, and Tomaselli's eleven year old daughter, Catherine. My own interest is through my MA Research Thesis on the narratives of the /Xam [Jeursen 1994].

The aim of the visit was to:

investigate Basarwa land rights issues and claims, and to assess what kinds of development projects might be appropriate for this remote group of about one hundred people. This group lives one hundred kilometres (3-4 hours dr ive) from the nearest formal settlement, where some of the Basarwa children attend school.

compare the actual conditions under which this group lives with the mythical images created by the media.

study the nature of the encounter between our visiting group of seven and the Basarwa community of about one hundred.

The first interview tries to assess the relationship that Waldron has established with the Basarwa group, how it has changed, and why he travels to this remote part of the Kalahari. These are important questions in the light of mythical Western media perceptions of the `Bushman', the exploitation of this image in advertising and the media generally, and in the light of numerous philanthropists who couch their visits in the expeditionary discourses of `saving the Bushmen' [Perrott 1992].

The mystique of First Peoples is both a resource and a curse. It is a resource because it provides opportunities for the `Bushmen' to exchange the stereotypical image of themselves and their artifacts for cash income. But it is a curse in that the `Bushmen' are manipulated by discursive forces beyond their control, and often, comprehension, to exhibit tourist-orientated behaviour, and to feed now discredited anthropological paradigms of a stone-age people frozen in time. It follows that anyone expressing an interest in the `Bushmen' has to critically negotiate these discourses to ensure that they are not tarred with the same brush.

"A Woman and Vehicles Hell and A Man's Paradise" **

The slogan in the above heading was printed on a bumper sticker of the Hukuntsi Store, a crossroads some one hundred kilometres from our destination. The slogan gives some idea of the state of the roads, which are little more than cut-lines through the bushveld - on which we had to travel often at little more than 15-25 kms per hour in four wheel drive - to get to our eventual destination. It also invokes all the stereotypical notions usually associated with safaris through inhospitable terrain which the Camel cigarette company popularises in `The Camel Trophy'.

Having arrived after three days on the road, most of us felt, I think, a little unsure about camping in two tents on the edge of the Basarwa village (or werft). Although we were there as a team with specific aims, it was also a personal experience for each of us, not knowing what to expect. The community, in contrast, seemed to understand some Western notions of social and individual distance relating to their interactions with us.

During the first few mornings everyone turned out to greet us. We videoed and photographed the interactions, especially between Catherine and Miriam, who befriended each other almost immediately. The small children referred to our 35mm still cameras as "snappies", but paid no attention to the three video cameras, possibly because they were used to them from Waldron's previous visits.

With the exception of Waldron, we were amateurs when it came to trying to assess how to interact with their social conventions. For example, women with beads and other items to sell would walk towards our camp, and then sit on the edge of our space, waiting for acknowledgement. They would sometimes wait for a long time before one of us would make contact. The length of their waiting grew as the week passed by, and as we became increasingly reluctant to purchase yet more artifacts with our ever dwindling money supply.

Conversely, at first we tended to avoid the village, except when discussing `business' such as development issues. On one occasion, two members of our party simply walked through the village in search of someone, only to feel that they had unconsciously violated a community space.

With regard to the Basarwa group's self-identity, they identified themselves as !Kung, and their language as Sesarwa, with some speaking Afrikaans and Tswana as well. Afrikaans had been learned by the men who had worked on farms in Namibia, particularly //Kuru!ka (Petrus) Nxai and his brother Baba (Kort Jan) Kies Nxai. The names in brackets are th e `white' names they have given themselves. Kort Jan identified the melons we had collected along the route as "Boesman se water" (Afrikaans - `Bushman's water'), although they were too bitter in this case to be eaten. Both men sport tattoos of horses, stars and fish, which they say were all done by the same person on the farm where they worked, using a needle and battery acid, a process which they admit was very painful.

The community has been living in the area for the last 5 or 6 years. Before that the y were situated about 100km away, at a site which had a borehole. They were then moved to the present site by the Botswana government. The only other visitors we saw during the week of our visit were the police, who arrived in a van and wanted to know what we were doing, a water truck and a Danish Aid worker who stopped over briefly as we were leaving to administer physiotherapy to a crippled child.

It is in the light of this introduction that I interviewed Waldron on the history and motivation of his visits to the Kalahari. This article is not intended to provide an exhaustive analysis of our ethnography, but rather to identify issues and questions for further discussion, especially with regard to the nature of the encounter [see Tomaselli and Sheppers on 1996].

***

Jeursen: What were the circumstances of your first trip to this particular part of the Kalahari?

Waldron: Friends of mine had come to the Western Kalahari, Botswana, many years ago and told me of the beauty of the scenery. I have had a l ong-standing love affair with the Kalahari. They mentioned that they had encountered a group of Bushman in the area. At that stage I thought that possibly it would be nice to meet them, but that was not the main focus of my trip. However, when I arrived, I met two young men on the pan, one of whom is here this time, Maleka, and he had been to school at Tepologo Primary at Werda, South Africa, so he could speak a little English. I heard them clicking in their !Kung language and saw their excitement, and they took me to their so-called headman, Hiwa Nxai. I found myself overwhelmingly attracted to the openness and friendliness of these people. When they invited me to stay and make camp here, I did. There was no primary focus to the trip, like "Should I go and see the Bushman and interface with them?" I just wanted to be with them; they were nice people to be with, similar to if you met someone on the Paris Metro and decided to go and have coffee with them. That's what happened, but obviously in communing with these people, and because they are supposedly the First People, one becomes curious, so that curiosity was a driving factor, finding out how their society works, how they could survive out here in waterless desert. I was interested and intrigued to see that they are still partially a hunter-gatherer society, but not in the romanticised sense.

Jeursen: Have you found that your reasons for coming here have changed?

Waldron: Yes they have. I grew to like the community very much but there are further reasons why I come here now. I now actively come here to find out a little more about their society. I'm also very concerned with the land rights of these people.

Jeursen: Could you tell me more about the land rights issues here?

Waldron: It seems to me, according to the information I have, that the group I visit most, whom we are now with, don't have any entrenched land rights. These rights are not written into the Constitution from what I can divine. This is a concern for me because in numerous interviews and discussions that I have had with the Bushman here they have established that in their living memory, they have always lived in this area. When I talk about this area I am talking about one hundred kilometres in any direction from here, because when you are a hunter-gatherer you have to be mobile over those kinds of distances.

So it would seem that there are no rights entrenched for them, but I feel that there should be; that is possibly an imposition on my side, but we can speak further of my philosophy about empowering people with choice. My largest concern here is that if somebody comes along to you, for example, and asks if you own a piece of land and you then produce a title deed, you are enacting a role within a Westernised infrastructure. These people don't have a piece of paper entitling them to land that they and their forefathers have been born on. It is rather like asking a tree for the title deed. Because of this, and because of their almost total unfamiliarity with Western systems dominant in the area, they are not informed about the number of choices that they can make, to enable them to make an effective decision, whatever that decision might be. So that has shifted the focus of my visits.

Also, I am particularly interested in the bonding that happens between men when they go hunting. I believe that this bonding, harmony and great friendship and deep love for each other that is evident and is echoed in their statements about each other, is a very valuable thing that we could learn something from and that all of us, having probably derived from hunter-gatherer societies at some time or another, would have had that would have united our societies rather than disintegrating them.

Jeursen: With regards to the male bonding you just mentioned, can you tell me about the incident you experienced on a previous trip between the two men you thought were fighting?

Waldron: I was over at what we could call the shebeen here; one woman makes fiery "sugar water" which people partake of on a fairly regular basis. I went to go and change some money so that I could buy some more ostrich egg shell beadwork. While I was there a friend of mine, Monday, started fighting with another man, and I grew alarmed and tried to separate them. Then on seeing my alarm they both backed off and laughed and I realised that they were having a mock fight. Immediately Monday grabbed the other man's hand and kissed it affectionately and then they both leaned forward and kissed each other warmly on the lips and called each other friend. It was wonderful to see two men alarmed at having alarmed me, so readily able to heal any possible friction that might have been interpreted.

Also, I went hunting with Petrus Nxai, also called //Kuru!Ka, which means greenery, the day before yesterday. Just myself and him went off with assegais, and whilst I have been on hunting trips with Petrus before, I have never been an active hunter. This time I was and we ran off with his dogs. It soon became apparent to me that he needed my reassurance that we could work together. His phraseology was "Saamwerk, saam lewe" (Afrikaans - `Working together, living together'), and he was giving me a brief bonding and education lesson about this as we were running after the dogs, telling me what to do with my spear. Once we saw a gemsbok that was brought to bay by the dogs I was to throw my spear into the hindquarters of the animal while he dealt with the "working end". We walked sometimes, we ran sometimes, and we did follow the dogs which eventually brought to bay a Bat-Eared Fox which we killed and ate later. But what was particularly interesting was how we could converse while we were hunting and the camaraderie which developed between us, which was quite unique because I had a very strong sense of a longing fulfilled. I felt a deep sense of relevant meaning and I think that he did too. In that situation when two men are helping each other to survive and at the same time to find food for their brethren there can be no room for dissent, there is great pressure for harmony and brotherhood. I believe that that can be a great healing factor for all types of people, uniting in a common cause that goes beyond many of the so-called western bonding processes.

Jeursen: Tell me about the issues of exchange and negotiation that went on the day after the hunt.

Waldron: What happened was that we (the two 4 X 4s with myself, Keyan, archaeologist/development worker, Conrad Steenkamp, Petrus and his older brother, Babba (Kort Jan) Nxai) drove for three hours to the hunting area, which is also used by a safari company. We went with these men, in their territory, with their spears, with their skills and very little of ours. We transported them and their dogs to the hunting grounds which are some forty to fifty kilometres away from the village because the animals are pretty wary of hunters and tend to skirt around the village. Under normal circumstances they have to travel very far by donkey with water containers. They ride or walk next to their donkeys, as the donkeys carry a lot of water. After the hunt by Petrus and myself, and whilst we were eating after we had rejoined the vehicles, I realised that Petrus had been teaching me a lot while we were hunting.

I'm familiar with the basics of tracking but Petrus was teaching me the finer points of tracking, how to tell the time the animal had travelled through the area, male or female etc. It occurred to me that this knowledge, which is very valuable to me, should be paid for, because if I was asking a university professor or a professional consultant for my business for advice, I would pay him for this kind of information. So we discussed it and pre-negotiated a deal in the vehicle, coming back. However there was a misunderstanding.

Jeursen: Was it just the two of you in the vehicle?

Waldron: No, there was Kort Jan, who also speaks Afrikaans. However, he was in the back of my Land Rover looking after the dogs and Petrus was sitting next to me. I had negotiated 40 pula as a fee for him and 20 pula for each of the other hunters. However it seems that he has been a guide for a hunting safari company in this area when hunting was still allowed here. It is now going to be allowed again this year and they had negotiated 50 pula for him as the chief tracker and 30 pula for the others per day. In that negotiation I informed him that we are not one of the large safari companies that can pay for the privilege of hunting the animals out here, that we don't have those kinds of funds available but that maybe we could reach a compromise in between because we felt that the services should be paid for. At this point, his older brother Kort Jan interjected and said, "Yes, want julle is mos vriende, jy kom kuier hier" (`Yes, because your are really our friends, you come here to visit'). We haven't agreed on a final price but it will certainly be lower than the safari prices. It seems that they enjoy our company and we enjoy theirs; however we are taking up their time when they could be doing other things. Perhaps we are even impeding their progress in the hunt?

Jeursen: And they must also feel some sense of responsibility for you as you aren't experienced in hunting.

Waldron: Yes they were concerned, this was notable, especially in Petrus, who was the leader and was trying to get me to harmonise with his way. Once they were aware that we are not similar to a safari hunting group and they had of their own volition come to the conclusion that we are visitors and friends, we reached a different agreement, although a final price has not been reached, but certainly we will need to address this in the future. It also occurred to me that they have never asked before; they've allowed me to camp here for many years and I have never paid them any fee for doing so, although I have brought gifts of tobacco, sugar, tea etc.

Jeursen: You haven't been here with so many people before either?

Waldron: Yes, the most that have been here are three people; this is the highest impact on their resources. For the first time, we have some of their water from the water tank. So this is the anthropological version of fiscal creep, slowly starting to abu se their resources if we continue this way. We'll have to watch that.

Jeursen: How has it been different for you being here with more than two other people, and particularly people that you don't know well?

Waldron: It has been enjoyable for me but I have deliberately tried to step back and not thrust anybody into doing anything. I rather wanted to let people have their own discoveries; that way I won't be biasing what they encounter, or at least to a lesser degree. It 's been interesting for me to see the way that we interact with them, I think that there has been some very wonderful interaction. What I have noticed with the Bushman with this amount of people is that they have been more reticent, they haven't been as comfortable. Before I would be sitting and the tent would be surrounded with people from early in the morning, but now they have given us a lot more space. I'm not sure if there are other factors contributing to this apart from just our presence. Also my time has been divided amongst other people in this party, rather than solely focused on the Bushman. I've spent less time with them, which is not entirely satisfactory to me, there are other things that I wanted to do on this trip, but I don't resent this. I think it is just the natural outcome of there being more people on the trip.

Jeursen: Could you tell me more about your personal philosophy of why you are here, what you are doing.

Waldron: My personal philosophy is about choice. It's about providing people who do not have any knowledge of the range of choices they can make with an understanding of the further range of choices that are available to them. If you are a Bushman and you have been living in the Kalahari for hundreds of years, and in recent years been moved from one place to ano ther when in fact this has been your native land, there is a lot of misunderstanding and frustration about not being empowered to do anything about it and not trusting those that are in power. Therefore, it is almost as though one has to be a midwife between one society and another, whereby you can protect the one society from the other by being a representative of the opposing society. I know that that is an awfully presumptuous thing to say but, in line with the philosophy of empowering with further choices, I believe that I am in a position to help the Bushman see the way that another society works and what it requires, to help them gain the rights that are basic to every human being, that they are not even aware of being in written form. Furthermore, they are not aware of the pressures that can be brought to bear on national and local Southern African states for their benefit. I feel that this has possibly been deliberately so on the part of some authorities. What we have is a situation where the first people of this land, the first recorded people that occupied this Southern African area are in fact the last people to have land rights.

I believe that is an injustice and that the basic bill of human rights can be applied here, as anywhere, and they can be empowered to understand those choices. Ultimately, if they have been empowered to make those choices and are fully knowledgeable of the implications of those choices, they can choose, for example, to give over some concessions of their land to oil mining , diamond mining, cattle farming, or whatever they choose. Ecologists of the world might recoil in horror but these people have not had a choice and, worse than that, they have not had the ability and the knowledge to make the choice. They deserve that.

Jeursen: How can that be implemented on a practical level by you?

Waldron: It can't be implemented on a practical level by myself. What I have informed them about is what is required in terms of the land acts in Botswana, the importance of firmly establishing as far back as they can in living memory their rights to tenure in certain areas. I have documented this where possible. I have also transcripted the names of people with whom they have interfaced over a period of time, who can substantiate their existence in an area. It is not going to be an easy task because they don't have that piece of paper with the title deed on it. However, they do have their presence in the area and there are some indefatigable proofs as far as I am concerned, in terms of their knowledge of the land. They can take you fifty or even a hundred kilometres from here to a place or a specific pan and they can show you something there that they know is there. Other examples are the pans that they know and the names that they call them. I do believe that they have some sacred sites which I have not yet found out about; this could also be valuable as these will have markings and relics from those times. But that will require a lot more trust.

Jeursen: Each of us in coming here seems in some way to be creating some kind of myth for ourselves. Do you think you are doing this in any way?

Waldron: I suppose it is inevitable to create or recreate a myth in terms of your attitude, how one has been brought up, what kind of life/world background one brings with one to this environment, but even if you try and strip this away and get down to basics, you are creating another myth. So I doubt that it is possible to ever strip away one's ego entirely which is what causes the myth to surround one. However, again I go back to basic human rights as the fundamental here; if that is the focus of an interaction then rights that have been agreed upon by the vast majority of the world can be attempted to be entrenched. Of course there is the argument that asks who we are to have the right to entrench rights for other people or to inform them of their rights, but then that leads to insanity ...

Jeursen: What one is doing in that case is simply establishing very basic human rights I suppose.

Waldron: I think the real dangers lurk in people who are trying to create something that was never there, or was there in some convenient distant past, the loin cloth clad Bushman surviving off the land and living in harmony with nature. I doubt that that was ever the case.

* * *

I also interviewed Tomaselli, who took //Kuru!Ka (Petrus) and Babba (Kort Jan) Kies Nxai in his vehicle to the hunting grounds. In talking to //Kuru!Ka during the three hour trip, Tomaselli established that he and other members of the community had initially seen ourselves as a resource. One somewhat inebriated man living beyond the village, for example, had insisted that Tomaselli take pictures of him in front of his stick dwelling. He then demanded five gemsbok in payment for providing Tomaselli the opportunity of picture-taking. //Kuru!Ka had wanted payment for the tracking services being offered by himself. He also pointed out a variety of places to Tomaselli where he claimed to have nearly died of thirst during various hunting expeditions when no visitors were available to drive him to the hunting area. In the hunting area itself he had rigged a 20 litre plastic container in a tree, which was refilled with water carried in one of the 4 X 4s.

Tomaselli also witnessed the interchange between Waldron and the hunters the next day on the question of payment. He remarked that it was interesting that the hunters did not seem to consider that the costs incurred in driving to the hunting grounds could be part of a barter arrangement, but wanted cash payment irrespective of these costs. This could have been because the safari company includes these hidden costs in the hire of the trackers. The Nxai brothers seemed also to have some difference of opinion on the extent of the payment requested - Babba eventually insisted that Waldron (and the rest of us) were visitors, their friends. //Kuru!Ka conceded this point rather reluctantly, Tomaselli told me.

While our intention had been to video these kinds of interactions, this rarely happened. Tomaselli, who has eighteen years of experience as a documentary film maker, especially of the `vox pop' genre, was reluctant to record the interchange mentioned above because he felt that this was "an intimate moment", one in which Waldron and the hunters were negotiating the future of their relationship. To have fetched a camera and intruded into the discussion might have destroyed the very essence of what Waldron was searching for, Tom aselli told me sometime later.

Tomaselli told of another interaction which he observed but did not video. This occurred at one of the extensive pans in the hunting area where he, Steenkamp, Babba and another tracker were waiting for the return from the hunt of Waldron and //Kuru!Ka. Steenkamp had found some stone-age flints in the pan and was showing them to the hunters. The extraordinary thing about this discussion was that these two hunters claimed to be totally unaware of the history and use by their forbearers of these flints as arrowheads. Here was an academically educated archaeologist literally excavating the history of Basarwa hunting technology to two Basarwa who insisted that they had always used metal spear heads.

Bows and arrows are not used for hunting any more. The hunters use dogs to locate the game, and then trap the animal. They make assegais which consist of metal beaten flat and sharpened, then attached to a long, flexible wooden staff which has animal gut wound around it to attach th e metal. Added to this, they make a leather pouch attached to a thong. The thong is slipped over the staff and the pouch over the spear-end to protect the point and the people who handle it. Single men riding donkeys, some with dogs, can be seen leaving the village to go hunting. They return a few days later, their dogs sometimes following in the days after that. When we asked the hunters about water for the dogs in their journey of at least fifty kilometres back to the village, //Kuru!Ka Nxai told us that the dogs were given water before the hunt. We could not make ourselves understood in our question about how long the dogs could go without water so we changed the topic of conversation. The dogs are also kept short of food to encourage them to hunt. Though hunting was clearly in evidence while we were there, the village is littered with rusting tin cans and decaying cardboard packaging. Our hosts always seemed a little surprised when they saw us burying our rubbish, and it is probable that this was dug up after our departure.

Report on Interview with Miriam Motshabise

Although Miriam Motshabise consented to an interview with me before I offered her something in exchange for information, I did feel that this means of operating was anticipated by her. Although I felt somewhat uncomfortable making such an offer, she readily accepted the exchange of clothing for the interview and did not seem to share my discomfort.

Motshabise told me that there are thirty-four students in her Form 2 class who are mostly Tswana. She expressed some dissatisfaction with her school life, saying that the other girls treated her badly, although she could not give any specific examples of this. She did say that the girls who do not like her are Tswana, and that their dislike stems from the fact that she is from a Basarwa community. She also spoke about a Tswana man in her own community who "wants to hit" her because she protects her younger sister from him. She told me about an incident that had taken place on the morning of the interview, and pointed out the man when he came to the camp site during the interview, but I could not establish the nature of the conflict.

During the holidays Miriam lives with her sister, who is married and has children of her own. There are about 15 people sharing the dwelling, a cross between a traditional Bushman skerm and a Tswana homestead, which is very crowded. Miriam has five brothers and sisters. Her mother died some years ago and her father lives in a town somewhere in Botswana and does not seem to take much interest in the welfare of his family.

Miriam expressed interest in becoming a teacher when she leaves school, but seemed confused as to whether she wants to stay and teach children in her own community or leave and go live in a town, like Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. She gave conflicting views on this to various members of our group; after telling Susan Manhando about wanting to leave the community, she later told me that she wants to remain and teach the smaller children. A school was in the process of being built while we were there, apparently to accommodate the younger children so that they do not have to leave the community to go to school at a young age. As the community has now been given bricks by the Botswana government to build the school it seems as if they are going to be given the chance to stay and settle in the area, even though it does not have a regular water source. Miriam said that some people in the community feel "sad" because they have been moved and that the gove rnment told them the area they were in before was a national park, necessitating the move.

Miriam said she finds life in the community difficult because there is not enough water and she has to fetch wood every day, a task which she does not enjoy. She told me that a Council truck comes every week with 5 000 litres of water for the whole community. (This water is transferred into two large water storage tanks, one of which has a tap at an incorrect angle so that only small containers can be filled, and the other a tap which is very difficult to turn on, impossible for most people). When I asked Miriam how the water is shared out, she told me they fetch it in containers. When asked if the distribution is equal she could not really answer my question, although she did say that her grandfather is in charge of the distribution of water. (From what we observed, it seemed that people came and went freely from the water tank, so it may be that there are (unspoken) agreements as to the sharing of water). By the end of our six day visit, our 500 litres of water had been exhausted, and we were granted permission to siphon some from the tanks, in exchange for one 20 litre plastic container.)

When asked if she feels part of the Basarwa community, Miriam said yes, although she had expressed some doubts about this in an earlier conversation we had. I also asked her what she thought of our group coming to the area. She said she was pleased to be able to speak English with someone as she wants to learn the language. As for the other people in the community, she said most of them thought we had come simply to buy things from them. (Waldron stated that on occasion he had spent upwards of 1000 pula ($US350) on purchasing artifacts during his previous visits.) Miriam also said, however, that some people realised we had come to "visit" as we had arrived with Waldron, who had come before.

Miriam said that when someone in the community becomes ill they usually go to the clinic at a formal settlement. Some of the people in the area have tuberculosis and Miriam said that people had died from the disease. When we arrived earlier in the week Waldron was informed that the previous `headman', Hiwa Nxai, had died of a chest disease. Some of the older people apparently think the doctors at the clinic will kill them; this may have stemmed from some sick people going to the clinic and not coming back or dying anyway. She said it is mostly men who contract the disease.

People in the community apparently get married at about 25, not before that, as at 21 they are supposed to build their own house, man or woman. Miriam said that when she is 21 she will move from her sister's dwelling and build her own hut with the help of her friends.

Miriam spent a lot of time with Catherine Tomaselli. This interchange is documented in the photographs and video, in which they can be seen teaching each other folk dances and songs, watched and joined by the assembled children of the village. This expressive intercultural interchange occurred during the two mornings after we arrived. The boys played a hunting game, in which one of the boys pretended to be a Gemsbok while the others took on the role of either hunter or dog. The girls played a variety of games, including the well-documented melon-tossing game. As the week drew on, Catherine and Miriam spent less time dancing and more time talking to each other. Catherine was invited by Miriam to the Basarwa werft on occasion, but was not invited on wood gathering expeditions or to participate in other chores. Catherine, Susan Manhando, Dorothy Roome and myself walked down to the nearest pan one morning with Miriam to look at a dried-up borehole. Miriam was very quiet on this occasion and remained so for the rest of the day.

Comments on the Encounter

So what then was the nature of our encounter? Language and cultural barriers, as well as time constraints, prevented us from interacting as fully as we might have liked most of the time. I would have liked, for example, to speak to the women of the village about their status within the community, but my self-consciousness and their shyness prevented this. I did not know how to approach them, and felt hesitant to force an interaction. The difference between what we have been led to believe about `Bushman' communities, through the media and other sources, and the reality of the lives of the people we met cannot be emphasised enough. As an outsider, the idea of living in such naturally beautiful surroundings may seem appealing, but it is not possible to romanticise the kind of poverty, lack of rights and daily hardship we saw the community undergoing. Amenities many take for granted, such as water and electricity, were starkly highlighted for the group, and the tension this sometimes created within our group made it easier for us to understand the tensions which may arise in a community permanently deprived of such amenities.

To arrive in a remote community, stay for five days and then vanish again did not allow for any real communication to take place. Most of us were, it seems, left at the level of interfacing without understanding, and what we experienced led to questions rather than answers. We also have to ask ourselves what we can offer the community. Copies of the photographs taken have been sent to Miriam, whose postal address at school is the only one we could obtain, but we have no way of knowing what kind of impact we had on the community. Future trips to the same area to carry out further research and to build up some kind of relationship of mutual respect and trust between the community and ourselves would be necessary for encounters of this kind to have any substantial significance for the Basarwa or for us.

Notes

We use the collective name the group gave to themselves, which is Basarwa. The preference for `Bushman' underlined by Hunter Sixpence from the Kuruman Development Trust, Ghanzi, (about 200 kilometres from where we stopped) at the "People, Politics and Power: the Politics of R epresenting the Bushman People of Southern Africa" Conference, Johannesburg, August 1994, has since been revised. Sixpence stated that the "Bushman" peoples were discussing the naming amongst themselves and that until their Commission reported on the matter , the term `Bushman' was quite acceptable. At "The Dancing Dwarf From The Land of Spirits First Centre For The Study of South African Literature And Languages Interdisciplinary Conference", University Of Durban-Westville, September 1995, a visiting academic from the University of Botswana, L Molamu, challenged speakers on the use of the terms "San" and "Bushman", saying that the term Basarwa is now being widely used by those communities.

Into the Future: Developments after 1990

Author: Jeursen, Belina
Date: 1995
"Recuperating the San", was a theme issue of Critical Arts (1995) which indicates the increasing popularity of "Bushman studies" after the 1950s, when the "Bushmen" were suddenly very much in demand (Wilmsen 1995:5), not only by anthropologists and filmmakers, but fiction writers and museums too. Because one can enter the "Bushman debate" from almost any perspective, from art and archaeology to media studies or musicology, the debates often seem fractured, but the situation is really one of more approaches than issues.

Critical Arts
, a journal for cultural studies, provides an excellent illustration of the overlap of issues between disciplines and contexts, countries and cultures. Although the 1995 theme issues and later editions do not, and indeed cannot, encapsulate the myriad debates surrounding the Bushmen, the journal offers a valuable cross-section of contemporary debates. The concepts of recuperation and representation of the Bushmen on which the 1995 issue centres serve as magnets for numerous other issues, whilst ensuring that there is an identifiable thread running through the articles, which deal with topics as diverse as iconography, advocacy, the South African Defence Force and rock art.

In his Introduction to the issue, Keyan Tomaselli explains the link between recuperation, representation and the Bushmen: "The `new' South Africa has recuperated a different, affirmative image of the San, in comparison to the negative, prejudiced, representation of `bushmen' previously popularised by the pro-apartheid media" (1995:i). He sees this new image as being derived from the romanticised writings of Laurens van der Post, and proposes that it "projects the San as the bridge between the past and future" (ibid; also see Tomaselli 1992c). This recuperation has taken place across a wide range of genres, and includes not only the visual, but the written, the symbolic and the political. But what does the image of the Bushmen as First People signify? And why is it such a popular symbol?

Tomaselli and others regard the arguments raised by Ntongela Masilela (1987) as seminal in this regard. Masilela's recuperation of the writings of Laurens van der Post thus form a third unifying thread for the issue, although not all the authors explicitly refer to it. Masilela regards Van der Post's writings as crucial in their imaging of the Bushmen as First People, for he believes that Southern African literature holds one of the keys to the ideological workings behind our history. He takes van der Post's The Lost World of the Kalahari as an example of his generation of writers and their intention to establish their origins and construct a unified South African national culture, this in the context of the beginnings of apartheid. Masilela proposes that they could only do so by beginning with the Bushmen as First People (1987:58).

Tomaselli writes that "Masilela sees in San culture a means to avoid the destructive competing nationalisms which threaten to sink the emergence of a non-racial future for this country" (1995:vii). He agrees with Masilela's analysis of the popularity of the San as a symbol, as does Ed Wilmsen (1995), who undertakes a detailed critique of the writings of Van der Post. But Stuart Douglas (1995), in writing about land claims in post-apartheid South Africa, argues that instead of decentring competing nationalisms, the notion of a "First People" may lead to further competition between national groups who have competing land claims. Whatever the differences of opinion voiced in these three texts, all three authors, and Masilela himself, indicate problem areas in the positioning of the Bushmen as First People. These touch on some of the major "Bushmen debates".

Masilela, in his original article, points out that Van der Post positions the Bushmen in the past, in pre-history, which excludes them from any contemporary milieu; he is also critical of Van der Post's reference to Khoi and San people as "child-men", an image which has remained popular despite all efforts to dispel it (1987:60). This positioning of the Bushmen as Stone Age people lies at the centre of many debates about race and culture, and is highly revealing of Western attitudes to the "other".

Tomaselli takes up the Jungian perspective adopted by van der Post, and uses it to analyze Van der Post's own works. He regards Van der Post as "primarily seeking the lost childhood of mankind" (1995:iv). Tomaselli is also concerned with the mobilising of popular myths about the Bushmen in film, television and advertising (Buntman 1996; Tomaselli 1992b). Jamie Uys's The Gods Must Be Crazy, Paul Myburgh's People of the Great Sandface, and director Manie van Rensburg's television series The Mantis Project all provide perfect examples of the kinds of myths Tomaselli and others want to point out. As Douglas and Wilmsen also illustrate in their articles, the positioning of the Bushmen as First People is never unproblematic, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that there are few First People in South Africa. The Bushmen here were exterminated by the 1930s in what must be one of the most silenced and prolonged acts of genocide.

Regarding the Bushmen as First People, or at least a symbol thereof, depends on other beliefs about them - that they are representative of pre-historic humans, that their culture has remained intact, that they have in their possession the lost innocence of humankind. These beliefs in turn rest on the idea that the Bushmen are a people frozen in time, ignorant of modernity and permanently situated outside of the context of socio-political and economic concerns. In effect, this `other' becomes the bearer or the sign of what the West no longer has direct access to - a sense of community, a recognition of our essential humanity and innocence (1995:vi). Quoting Dieke, Tomaselli sums up well the binary upon which the construction of the `First People' rests: "white coloniser/murderer/death versus indigenous/First Culture/Life who:

throw a bridge between present-day consciousness, always in danger of losing its roots, and the natural, unconscious, instinctive wholeness of primeval times. Through this mediation the uniqueness, peculiarity, and one-sidedness of our present individual consciousness are linked up again with its natural, racial roots (1995:xii).

Wilmsen's article offers a detailed analysis of the literary writings of Laurens van der Post, in an attempt to find out what lies behind the image of the Bushmen as the First People of Southern Africa. Van der Post is widely regarded as the man who instituted the recuperation of the image of the Bushmen, from that of vermin to the Bushmen as representatives of the lost past. Wilmsen argues that the image of the `Bushmen' as First People is a sign which was not present in Van der Post's early novels. In fact, he writes, the San as they appear in his later novels are either nowhere to be found in the early novels, or are presented in a less than flattering light. Wilmsen views Van der Post's imaging of the `Bushmen' as the result of a trope, of a child's first memory, which begins with his early work. "The tropic figure of a child's first memory, thus, is as old as Van der Post's first novel" (1995:10). The first indication of this trope appears in 1952, and by 1986 the nanny who began as "a large, black, smiling, crooning, warm, full-bosomed figure" has become "a Bushman woman, a Stone Age person ... the most wonderful apricot skin and slightly mongol face" (ibid). This and other examples reveal the constructedness of Van der Post's imaging of the Bushmen.

The point of Wilmsen's article, however, is not just to find Van der Post out. What he is really trying to find out is why the image of the Bushmen is such a powerful and persistent sign, why the Bushmen fit the Jungian archetype of authentic humanity (1995:4). He believes that Van der Post's use of the `Bushmen' as a sign of "primitive" people still in possession of an essential humanity was due to the failure of his use of black people in this role in his earlier novels. This failure was due to the well-known fact that black Africans did not live a `primitive' lifestyle, and that literature which persisted in presenting Africans in this way were regarded as unsophisticated. "It is, perhaps, not to be wondered that Van der Post now sought new material" (1995:9). Wilmsen identifies two strains within this popularity, the Euro-American psychological search for the lost self/humanity/community, and the South African attempt to counteract competing nationalisms and suture the political divides which are part of this country's brutal history. He thus takes into account both the theories of Jung, mirrored by van der Post and others, and the Marxist arguments offered by Masilela.

Wilmsen regards the assumptions shared by Van der Post and Jung as essentially racialist in their division between the `primitive' and the `modern', the `primitive' and the `civilised'. The notion of the Bushmen as Stone Age replicas surfaces again here as Wilmsen explores Jung's and Van der Post's presentation of modernity as fatal to the human spirit. Wilmsen criticises the recuperation of the `Bushmen' image on three counts:

* Firstly, there are no Bushmen in South Africa and thus the idea of the Bushmen as the First People of this country is a false depiction;

* secondly, imaging the Bushmen in this way is an imposition by outsiders of outside notions;

* thirdly, the notion of the Bushmen as Stone Age representatives creates simplistic polarities.

I would add to this that these polarities are in fact not just simplistic but damaging, in that they do not allow the people known as Bushmen to enter the political arena in a meaningful way. They also feed the myths about these societies which are holding them back, for example, people who live in harmony with nature are regarded as having no use for money or material goods. If the San continue to be regarded as pre-historic people they will also continue to be regarded, conveniently, as a people who do not need to be part of the political economy or the wider social infrastructure.

Stuart Douglas's (1995) article, "The Human Isthmus: Dangerous Diluted Sewerage Poison: recuperating the `bushmen' in the `New' South Africa", is anchored in current South African land politics rather than literature, but the problems of recuperation are much the same. However, where Tomaselli and Wilmsen strategically agree with Masilela's assessment that the image of the Bushmen is a means to avoid destructive competing nationalisms, Douglas argues the reverse, that this kind of image leads to the recentring of such competitive nationalism. He uses the refugees of Schmidtsdrift and the Afrikaner Right Wing as a case study of two groups competing for the status of First People in South Africa as a means to successfully claim land on which they can create a separate community.

Douglas distinguishes between Bushmen and "bushman", claiming that "bushman" is a constructed category which is appropriated by many people, not just the Bushmen themselves. He demonstrates through his case study that it is a sign which is open to manipulation by both Right and Left wing because its definition can be applied by either. "On this score the notion of "bushman" being a bridge between the past and the future in a post-apartheid South Africa is not an inherently progressive idea" (1995:66).

The sign "bushman" has come to mean "First People" or indigenous people. Because South Africa has no living Bushmen who can undisputedly claim First People status, the category is left open for others to claim, among these Right Wing Afrikaners in the form of the Freedom Front. Thus the definition of "First People" comes into question. Douglas argues that claims made by the Schmidtsdrift Bushmen for land and separate cultural development can as easily be used by the Right Wing, Inkatha or any other group with a strong sense of self identity to justify their position. Because there are no Bushmen indigenous to South Africa any more, the Freedom Front regards Afrikaners as "next in line" for the position. If the Schmidtsdrift Bushmen, who are not indigenous to South Africa but can claim other "First People qualities", such as isolation, cultural continuity and uniqueness, are awarded land and other opportunities based on their claim to be a First People, then there is nothing which prevents other groups from doing so as well. Douglas believes that the Schmidtsdrift Bushmen have to remove themselves from efforts to secure their future on the basis of their "bushmanness" if they are to achieve anything.

However, the Left Wing has been largely responsible for ongoing recuperation efforts, not realising that these could lead to successful claims by opponent Right Wingers. The solution to the problem according to Douglas is the proviso that socio-cultural difference should not receive sanction or reward from political groups or the state, a position also taken by Gerard Maré in his research into ethnicity in South Africa (1992:107).

The two discussions of rock art in Critical Arts (1995) by Anne Solomon and Belinda Jeursen, are quite different in their content and approach. Jeursen's review essay, "Rock Art as a Bridge Between Past and Future: a common cultural heritage for the New South Africa?", explores the academic and popular interest in literature on rock art in recent years, which has led to the publication of many `coffee table' books and guides to the art. Her review follows the development of rock art research, its influence on the literature and this literature's influence on popular perceptions of the Bushmen, "For these are not just texts concerned with `art' or `cultural heritage'; they are a gauge of the development of critical thinking and each contains a distinct political message" (1995:120). Jeursen also takes up Masilela's essay, and asks whether the art really does represent a common cultural heritage, or whether it simply functions as another sign of `Bushman', aimed at healing the wounds of the past.

The literature provides a mirror for the changing attitudes of the South African public, as well as being an influence on attitudes in itself. Not all rock art books have been progressive in their representation of the San, and a public unaware of the larger debates may take at face value the literature to which they are exposed. In addition, the decontextualisation of rock art and its use for commercial purposes, such as advertising, propagates myths and stereotypes about living peoples. Her conclusion emphasises the need to distance living communities of Bushmen in southern Africa from the artists who last painted over a hundred years ago.

Solomon's article, "Representations and the Aesthetic in San Art" also explores rock art research, but her aim is to challenge male-centred interpretations of the art itself. This she does through a critique of the "Shamanistic model" developed by David Lewis-Williams for the interpretation of the art. Attempts to recuperate the art from previously simplistic interpretations have relied on viewing the art as symbolically complex and have situated it within a religious context. But this is problematic in its separation of the spiritual realm from everyday processes. The Shamanistic model thus re-iterates the age-old problem of the division of the sacred and the profane, and thus excludes or makes less visible other aspects, such as the role of women in production. The bias in favour of male figures in publications and illustrated texts which use the art is pointed out in relation to this. The fact that female figures receive little attention is seen as another example of the activities of women being habitually relegated to the profane, the mundane, the private, and thus ignored.

Solomon argues that the effect of this is that the political and the social cannot be accommodated sufficiently; although the 1980s saw attempts to incorporate the political into rock art, the Shamanistic model still privileges the sacred. She concludes that if we are to recuperate South Africa's past, we cannot only emphasise the religious aspect of the art. Clearly, the political aspects of the art and its production must be taken into account.

Duncan Brown's article, "The Society of the text: The oral literature of the /Xam Bushmen", takes up another aspect of the field in its exploration of the oral literature of the /Xam of South Africa. He regards these texts as "both a starting point for, and a continuing thread in, South African literary history" (1995:79). His article offers not only an in-depth analysis of the stories of the /Xam themselves, but of the implications of the collection and interpretation of these. The related issues of translation, recuperation and the danger of appropriation of these texts by Western literary discourse make interesting reading.

Robert Gordon, "Saving the Last South African Bushman: a spectacular failure?", focuses on the attempts of Donald Bain, well-known Bushmen advocate of the earlier years of this century, to "save the Bushmen". The debates around advocacy are crucial to the wider debates because they often reveal fundamental misconceptions about the Bushmen. Gordon places these attempts at advocacy within a socio-political context and attempts to explain the popularity of advocacy as a discourse within specific time periods. Gordon provides the historical context for many of the beliefs currently held and expressed in the recuperated images of the Bushmen, and so the article acts as a valuable source of additional information and perspective.

Tony Voss reviews in "Re-recuperating the San" five texts concerned with the Bushmen in one way or another and situates their production within recent South African political changes. He regards four out of five of the texts as directly recuperating the San for the purpose of creating a bridge between South Africa's past and its future. It is only Shaken Roots, with photographs by well-known photographer Paul Weinberg and text by Megan Biesele, that Voss regards as a realistic portrayal of the lives of today's Bushmen. I can vouch for Shaken Roots as a moving and well researched text by two people who have a long-standing involvement with the San of Namibia.

Finally, Mathius Guenther reviews a conference held in 1994 at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, "People, Politics and Power". His article confirms for me my own feelings about the conference. He regards it as having been unusual in that it set a precedent - the presence of Bushmen delegates. Although they remained silent for most of the proceedings and so were, once again, represented by others and to a large extent marginalised, their presence did make some difference. The presentations by delegates and representatives of Bushmen groups, through their focus on real problems, offered opposing, or at least differing, discourses to the academic rhetoric which so often dominates conferences. Guenther's review of the conference is well worth reading as it gives a good overview of and insight into not only the debates which arose at that conference but also the debates which a conference like this gives rise to. The Miscast exhibition and conference in 1996 followed in the footsteps of this conference, and saw a far greater presence of Khoisan representatives. It also succeeded in capturing the attention of the press and the public at large, with over 500 people visiting the exhibition daily! (Skotnes 1996). One can only hope that the debates themselves will continue to attract attention, and result in some form of real change rather than remaining in the exclusive ownership of academia (Jackson and Robins 1999).

The next section provides some background to the Visual Anthropology theme issue edited by Keyan Tomaselli on "Encounters of the kalahari", which appeared after nine years of research conducted by him in conjunction with Jake Homiak, head of the Smithsonian Institution's Department of Anthropology and its Human Studies Film Archives.

Modernization's Monologue in the Third World

Author: Dyll, Lauren
Date: 2002
Research Article

The objective of the paper is to examine modernization’s monologue in the Third World through an exploration and critique of the modernization paradigm and its development-oriented communication models.

These models were uni-directional and followed a one-way flow of innovations and ideas from the Western nations typically in North America and Western Europe to the developing nations, prescribing Western socio-political and more importantly technological values without engaging in a conversation with these developing nations. This eliminated the likelihood of a dialogue between developed and developing nations that may have assisted in more successful development programmes.

My paper explores the two macro-theories on which modernization is premised, the middle range theories which characterize this paradigm, the role of communication and media within this paradigm, and the scholars who created and supported its models and principles. Through the use of critical methodology I discuss the Western biases inherent in these development theories and communication models, and present a brief overview of the dependency paradigm as a reaction to modernization. Examples of these theories working at a micro or local level will be provided in order to understand how elements of the modernization development paradigm affect contemporary Africa. This empirical evidence is provided through an article in the Mail and Guardian, the Carte Blanche website, which covers a story of the relocation of the San Bushmen in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, and explanations of personal experiences in the Northern Cape and Southern Botswana in terms of how development in these Bushmen communities does or does not relate to the theories under discussion.

Review of The Great Dance

Author: Dodd, Vanessa
Date: 2000
2000
75 Minutes
Colour
Video by Craig Foster
Earthrise Productions
Directors: Craig and Damon Foster By Vanessa Dodd and Jeffrey Sehume
Graduate Programme in Cultural and Media Studies, University of Natal, Durban.
Synopsis:
The Great Dance
describes the life of the !Xo people of the Kalahari. It is told by !Nqate (meaning ‘always walking’) Xqamxebe, a San Bushman hunter. The film depicts the hunter’s skills in hunting and tracking, his traditions and beliefs, and the way in which his lifestyle is altered and compromised as a result of the impact of the Western world and modernity. This film seems to attempt to understand San cosmology. Great Dance gives an idea of the free, self-reliant lifestyle of the Bushman in the past, and the actuality of his life in the present.

The film shows the San’s extensive knowledge of nature and how they are able to track animals by studying the faintest of prints in the baked earth. The hunter is shown to be tireless in his endeavours to feed his family. The hunting scenes also show the way in which the Bushman’s environment has changed and degenerated in recent times: “once we were near animals, now we must walk far to find them”.

Critique:The Great Dance differs from the Gods Must be Crazy films in that it depicts the Bushman less as a romanticized source of amusement for ‘civilized’ Westerners, and as more as a highly skilled, dedicated and intelligent expert in the intricate arts of tracking and hunting. Great Dance emphasizes the historically famed collectivity of San society. This is demonstrated in the preparation for hunting, how food is shared and in the social organization of the community. Political issues filter into the narrative, which describes the San’s ultimate political dislocation from their land, and consequently from their spirituality and livelihood.

The film shows how globalization has affected the once independent ways of life of this San community. This is reflected in the Western clothes worn, the combination of indigenous entertainment with radios, and in their familiarity with commerce. It indicates that the makers of the documentary were concerned with presenting as ‘realistic’ as possible a portrayal of contemporary San society. The !Xo people are aware that “our ways are being changed”. !Nquate says “sometimes we feel we have no future”. He is very concerned that their children should learn their culture and the “ways of the dance”.

Dancing is a significant theme in the film, and is possibly symbolic of the residual San culture and previously traditional ways of life. They believe that tracking is like dancing because the body is happy. They also dance to bring rain, and to celebrate when they have food. The people believe that “when you are tracking and dancing you are talking to God”. Thus in The Great Dance, dancing seems to represent joy and fulfillment in the !Xo people's culture. As the film ends, !Nqate is dancing beside a fire and then, as words appear on the screen telling the audience that since the making of the film the !Xo people's individual hunting rights have been revoked, and that they still hope to gain rights to the ancestral land where their forefathers hunted and gathered for 30 000 years, we no longer see him dancing.

In all, TheGreat Dance makes significant inroads into developing a more conscious, balanced portrayal of the of life of San-Bushmen in present society, bearing in mind the political pressures on the lives and cultures of these First people of the Fourth world.

Further reading:
Tomaselli, K. 2001. ‘ “We have to work with our own heads” (/Angn!ao): San Bushmen and the Media’. Visual Anthropology, forthcoming.

Acknowledgements:
This research is partly funded by the Natal University Research Fund. The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation: Social Sciences and Humanities toward this research is also hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the author and not necessarily attributed to the National Research Foundation. The larger project is being co-ordinated under the research leadership of Professor Keyan Tomaselli, Graduate Programme in Cultural and Media Studies, University of Natal, Durban. We also thank Craig Foster for making a copy of the film and supporting documents available for this research

The Life and Times of Sara Baartman

Reviewed by Vanessa Dodd,
Centre for Cultural and Media Studies, University of Natal, Durban.
The Life and Times of Sara Baartman

Synopsis
The Life and Times of Sara Baartman is a documentary about a young Khoi woman taken to Europe in the early 1800s, exhibited as a freak show and examined for scientific proof of the inferiority of her race. Sartjie (renamed Sara) Baartman was born in the Eastern Cape in 1790. After a commando attacked her community, she was taken to Cape Town where she worked as a slave for a farmer, Peter Cezar and was ‘discovered’ by Cezar’s brother Hendric, who was aware of Europe’s morbid fascination with the genitalia of the Khoi women. Cezar took Sara to London in 1810. There she performed in popular freakshows as The Hottentot Venus. After her exhibition met with disapproval in London, she was taken to France where she was sold to an animal trainer. In 1815, Sara was examined by three eminent French scientists, who wanted to view her ‘hottentot apron’, the existence of which would prove for them the inferiority of her race. This was prevented by her modesty, the problem of which was circumvented by her unexplained death in 1816. Cuvier then performed a post-mortem, in which he did not establish the cause of her death, but cut off her genitals, which he then presented to the Academy of Science as proof that the Khoi woman was not human.

The documentary does not attempt to re-enact this disturbing story, but tells it through the testimonies of historians and anthropologists; through newspaper reports, advertisements and letters of the time; through portraits, caricatures and cartoons, and through revisitation of places where the events took place. This technique gives an educated sense of the historical context of Sara’s life, and also makes the film less visually harrowing than a Spielberg version could have been.

Critique
The film deals primarily with the issue of racism as it pertains to Sara’s existence, death, and socio-cultural significance. Sara’s status in South Africa as a slave meant that she was unable to make decisions about her life. The farmer for whom she worked was in a position to say to his brother You find her bum interesting - take her and do with her what you will, as South African historian Yvette Abrahams put it.

The cruel way in which Sara was treated was motivated primarily by racism, by the perception of difference. Freak shows, which started in royal courts, were huge attractions in Europe. Sara was considered a freak because of her larger than average buttocks. Her presence in London was its people’s first physical confirmation of the myths about Khoi women. On 20 September 1810, an advertisement for the Hottentot Venus was published. The show, at two shillings a head, was a huge success. A British journalist, however, wrote of the Baartman exhibition, that the Hottentot was treated like a wild beast, a bear on a chain. She was kept in a cage, forced to dance even when she was ill, and threatened with fists or sticks when she did not co-operate. This reflects the racism entrenched in European society.

In 1915, Sara was observed by three eminent French scientists, including Georges Cuvier, at the Museum of Natural History. These scientists wanted to know about her ‘Hottentot apron’; the existence of which would prove to them that she was not human. Despite their lack of viewing success, as Sara clung to her modesty and refused bribes to reveal herself, they described her in relation to an animal - lips like a chimpanzee. These comparisons attempt to identify Sara as animal rather than human. Her similarity to animals is represented in the same way as her difference to other human women. Cuvier also described her thighbones as being like a carnivore’s, her buttocks resembling those of a female ape with a menstrual disorder. Representation attempts to place Khoi society as somewhere between ape and man, as a subhuman race. European society was obsessed with the need to classify everyone, to find the line where humans stop and animals begin.

Sara was perceived both as a Venus and an exotic freak, a woman and an ape. The French considered sex to be the definition of humanity. ‘Hottentots’ were believed to be inhuman, a different species, because of their different genitalia. After Sara’s death, the animal trainer gave her corpse to the Museum of Natural History. The cause of her death was not revealed in the postmortem, as Cuvier was far more interested in having a corpse to dissect that was unable to resist. He cut off her genitals, bottled them and presented them to the Academy of Science as evidence of Sara’s sub-humanity. Andre Langaney, director of Anthropology at the Musee de l’homme in Paris described Cuvier’s report of the autopsy as very exaggerated and fundamentally racist. According to Abrahams scientific racism was built on her body, and established the kind of thinking and classification which supported apartheid.

The representation of Sara Baartman relates to identity in the face of the Other. It seems that the Europeans wanted to reassure themselves that the Hottentots were the Other. Their fascination with freak shows stemmed from the desire to see anything different. Also, they needed to prove that Sara was Other, that she was subhuman, in order to justify their inhumane treatment of her. This desire to classify, to identify the Other, establishes a mode of relations, a hierarchy on which colonialism is based and which is necessary to support Western hegemony. Representation of the Hottentot Venus focuses on difference. Her larger buttocks and unique genitalia are cited as proof that she is different. Interestingly, the Bushman paintings shown in the film also depict the Khoi people with disproportionately large buttocks. For them, perhaps, this is a matter of cultural pride, a feature which distinguishes them as a group, yet for Sara in Europe, it makes her a rare specimen, a source of profit, a mythical phenomenon. The advertisement that appeared before her first exhibition referred to her as a most correct and perfect specimen and an extraordinary phenomenon of nature. A French journalist pointed out that she was not a very appealing Venus after seeing a Medici Venus. Her title The Hottentot Venus was more about revulsion than beauty, more about her extraordinary sexuality than her womanhood.

Representation is a significant theme in The Life and Times of Sara Baartman. The voiceover at the beginning of the film observes that Sara has been both a servant and a great attraction, both a Venus and an exotic freak, a cartoon in a song, a vaudeville in a book, she’s been a woman and she’s been an ape how could the same person play so many different parts? It does not seem, however, that Sara ever chose the roles she was to play. Her life was merely a consequence of the way others chose to represent her. Even in her death she was an object, like a beast drawn, measured and chopped, precisely preserved. Sara Baartman was not a woman with emotions and beliefs, a family and a husband-to-be. She was a skeleton in case 33.

The exaggerated plaster cast of Sara’s body, which depicts her with her eyes closed, also suggests her sub-humanity. The eyes are often believed to be the window of the soul, thus portraying Sara with her eyes shut suggests that she is a creature without a soul. Representation makes Sara into a symbol of sub-humanity. Sara’s image visually dominates the film. Her skeleton, the plaster cast of her body, her portraits and caricatures are frequently used as backdrops. This reminds one that is was her representation, in myth, in art, in literature, in science, as a woman and as an ape, a Venus and an exotic freak that destroyed her life.

Sara’s skeleton and body cast remained on display at the museum until 1974. Since the demise of apartheid in South Africa, there has been much debate about returning Sara’s remains to South Africa. According to Khoi belief, a soul cannot be at rest if the body is not respected. Thus there is profound social and historical significance in the returning of the remains of the Hottentot Venus.

Sara has become a symbol, for post apartheid South Africa, of injustice and discrimination that need to be redressed. The song played at the end of the film, Going back to Africa, seems to suggest that the wrongs Sara suffered will be put right if her body is returned to Africa where she belongs. The film makes a strong case for the need for Sara’s remains to be returned to her motherland, and for her body to be treated with proper respect, according to Khoi traditions. Obviously, this will not make up for the tragedy of Sara’s life. This documentary can be perceived as an attempt to change ways of thinking, to prevent the propagation of discrimination. It evokes racist signs which result in an emotional response, openly condemns racism, trying to persuade people to behave in a democratic manner, instead of in a racist way and aims to produce new responses to racism - resistance instead of acceptance.

Further reading
Tomaselli, K. 1988. The cinema of apartheid: Race and class in South African film. New York / Chicago: Smyrna / Lake View Press.

Acknowledgements
This research is partly funded by the Natal University Research Fund. The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation: Social Sciences and Humanities toward this research is also hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the author and not necessarily attributed to the National Research Foundation. The larger project is being co-ordinated under the research leadership of Professor Keyan Tomaselli, Graduate Programme in Cultural and Media Studies, University of Natal, Durban.

Reflexivity can be a quality in the film viewing experience where one takes on the thoughts and consciousness of the subjects (10). Many of us have experienced this phenomenon of reflexivity known psychologically as "flow", sometimes in a computer game or a good book we loose track of time, because we are so involved in the subject. This "flow is a form of reflexivity. I call this transformation.

The myths and icons are so hard, raw in The Hunters that it took me awhile for the cognitive functions and processes to develop my understanding of what I saw. This film requires a while to reflect while the powerful nature of the images cools.

The look on the hunter's face and lack of effort of the hunter to feebly throw a spear into the giraffe's chest spoke volumes. From several thousand miles away and 40 years apart the look on his face, touched me and I bonded with this fellow hunter and understood his paradigm (subsistence hunters) intuitively, hunter to hunter, killer to killer. In the face of the "other" I found myself. I saw me, technologically 200 years ago. At this point in the film, the context teleported me to Africa as a !Kung African hunter. Not as a black man but as a hunter, tracking, learning to think as the animal we hunt, reading spoor, following blood trails, stalking, killing, bleeding, gutting, skinning and butchering. The "subsistence" and "sport" hunting paradigms, both lined up and fell into place for me. The odor of hot blood, covered to your elbows in sticky warm wet blood is a context hunters understand. Both concepts want a kill, one for survival, the other is part ritual. One approves of any method to kill the animal and feed his family, the other has rules and codes about killing. One approves of the use of any and all weapons as it is less technologically developed. The other is highly developed and very accurate at long distances. (I qualified as an 'Expert Marksman' in the US Army, I can hit a fifty cent piece at 100 yards.) Both have an empathic feeling for the animal. I had never seen this, empathy in "savages" killing game before. Not like how I feel when I kill, but in this film that feeling, that look grabbed me and grounded my "sport" hunting context in this "subsistence" context. I now KNOW and understand the ontology of our "sports hunting" paradigm, maybe back to the Paleolithic, but can trace it at least back to the !Kung in the 1950's.

I experience crossed feelings of sorrow for the pain and suffering and death of this fine innocent animal. And feel joy and exultation over my abilities as a hunter to feed my family, if the chips are ever down. A feeling of carrying half the power of God; to kill. A sadness over using this power, causing pain and suffering in innocent animals. It was this feeling I saw in this hunter's look, that teleported filmicly, I became him. I understood the "subsistence hunters" method, just as I understand the "sport hunters " method, they are both the same. Except one is a matter of survival, of life or death, but technologically at least 200 years removed. This is one of the most powerful methods and uses of reflexivity I have seen.

The first time I felt this empathy was after I killed my first bird (non-game). I was excited by the power of my weapon and the abilities of my skill. This was soon overwhelmed by the feelings of waste, unnecessary death that could not be undone. I was ten years old at the time.

Never seeing this empathy in "subsistence hunters" is not unusual, I have almost never seen it in my "sport hunters" tribe either. It would be considered unmanly. It is evidenced sometimes by the silence of a new hunter (after his initial excitement) during his cleaning the game. Or the older more experienced hunters do not get a kill, they sometimes do not need or want a kill. Many hunters who intend to kill a deer are unsuccessful, from lack of ability or bad luck. Many hunters go through this ritual never intending to kill a deer. It is used as a socially acceptable way to commune with nature. A way to get away from work and live in the wild for a while re-charging our 'Green batteries'.

And this turns to motivation, for "subsistence hunting" usually it is for food. However deer hunting in the USA it is not for food, the cost of the license, weapons, ammunition, transportation and outfit cost, far exceed the cost for the equivalent amount of beef.

My motivation can be traced back to two events. Stories my Grandfather told me about how during the Great Depression he kept my father and Grandmother fed (they lost their home), by hunting as there was no work. During the 1950's in school we used to practice "Duck and Cover," hid under our little school desks, in case of Nuclear Russian attack, Atom Bombs. This was presented as the end of civilization. Even as an adult after I realized the unlikelihood of surviving a nuclear war, this thought has persisted, I do not need the food, I need to keep the hunter inside me alive.

Both of these experiences imbued in me a need to have the skills and abilities to hunt to feed my family, if it ever came to that. That started my annual hunter's ritual, hunting buck in Michigan. An annual testing ritual, have I lost touch with nature, do I have enough primitive in me still to track, kill and butcher, to with stand and endure days in the snow and sub-zero Temperatures? The wood fires, smell of smoke permeating my clothes and skin. Confirmation of my ability to chuck civilization and live off the land. Do I have what it takes to become a hunter-gatherer, if civilization collapses? I do feel some guilt over killing such an animal, but it feels imperative and basic to my survival to do so.

As kids we used to play shoot'em up, cowboy and Indians, and TV is loaded with shoot'em ups. It takes some discipline, skill and hardness of heart to actually kill an innocent animal, even for food. Depending on cold war conditions some years I have felt a need to prove, I still have these abilities. That is how I understand the "subsistence hunter." Some hunting buddies (tribe), and I get together and go hunting for bucks. 30-06 and I against Michigan's beautiful masters of the woods, magnificent, brown eyed, well muscled, innocent deer. I personally feel and experience the deer's death, as all hunters do, during cleaning I am up to my elbows in his warm blood. I feel proud of my skills and abilities just as the !Kung do, I am touched by its death and feel guilty over any unnecessary pain and suffering, just as the !Kung do in this film, for the first time I see we are hunting brothers, 200 or maybe even 100,000 years removed. In this movie I understood and FELT, a brotherhood with archaic man. In one glimpse I was teleported into a !Kung hunter.

Introduction

The premise of Tomaselli and Homiak's (1999) paper is: John Marshal, shot some of the best film footage in his career in the 1950's. This evaluation is contrary to Marshall's own statement, "not a single foot of film" ... he shot in the 1950's ... "was worth using" (9). Marshall's repudiation of this The Hunters as an artistic creation of his own imagination, deserves re-consideration. This film connected me, a hunter, to this !Kung hunter, using flint age weapons in a way that transformed me. Even if the native hunters did not kill the giraffe, this film has a sense of being there. For hunters it is transportingly haunting in nature. It is not my responsibility or desire to re-write the hypothesis to include this information. It is my desire to point out the powerful learning experience it coveys. I want to explore why this problem develops within anthropology and to question part of the anthropological paternal and imperialistic ontology's. And I want to point out John Marshal's intuitive genius in filmic recording the breadth and depth of the band he chose to focus. To recognize the context of his work, at the time this film was shot (1952- 1958) he was close to twenty years of age.